


A Question of Worth

by MagicalGirlHell



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Canon Divergence - Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Canon-Typical Violence, Earn Your Happy Ending, Fight Scenes, Gen, Humor, Self-Harm, Thor (Marvel) is Not Stupid, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-03-08 03:06:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 70,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13449225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalGirlHell/pseuds/MagicalGirlHell
Summary: The Odinsons' encounter with Hela goes awry when she doesn't arrive in time to stop a fight from breaking out between them. Now, with Hela trapped on Midgard, Thor must rely on help from old friends and new ones if he wants to defeat her before she can find a way off the planet. There's just one problem: will any of them be able to trust Loki? And perhaps more importantly...shouldthey?





	1. If He Be Worthy

**Author's Note:**

> **Content Warnings:**  
>  I have chosen not to use archive warnings because I'm not planning ahead for certain things, and while there _may_ be major character deaths at some point, I don't want to promise one way or the other. When the fic is finished, I'll update the warning accordingly.
> 
> This fic contains a brief scene of body horror, various references to suicide attempts/suicidal thoughts/self-destructive tendencies, and brief but explicit self-harm.

A warm glow washed over Thor’s face as Odin dissipated into sparkling dust. The Allfather was dead. _His father_ was dead.

The sky grew dark with clouds, the wind whipped against him. He stood.

His father was _dead_.

Thor turned to face his brother and Loki took a step away from him.

“Brother,” Loki started — soft, wary. The voice that had soothed Thor’s anger countless times over their centuries as brothers hit him like a static shock from a previously gentle hand. Whatever Loki was going to say didn’t matter. His father was dead.

“ _This was your doing_.” The words rumbled up from inside him like thunder.

Loki took another step back. The playfulness he’d displayed in Asgard — back when he’d thought nothing of his actions, before he’d seen or even anticipated their terrible consequences — was gone now. He raised his hands and made a placating gesture, as if he could physically push Thor’s anger away.

Not this time.

“Brother—”

“No,” Thor snapped, “ _You are not my brother_.” And it was a lie, because otherwise it could _never_ have hurt so much. But Thor knew, heartless, reckless, that no physical blow could ever hurt Loki the way those words would hurt.

If Thor expected him to crumble, he was disappointed. Loki’s face remained impassive. Maybe it _wasn’t_ a lie. Thor remembered his brother — laughing, crying, wild and deep and sensitive — and this dead-faced stranger before him was _nothing_ like those memories.

Lightning flickered above them in the dark. They stood face to face, and the distance between them felt like a sinkhole, the ground dropping out from beneath Thor’s feet. He could feel the pressure building, inside and out.

Thor slammed his “umbrella” into the ground with a sharp crack. Lightning engulfed him, pulling away his Midgardian guise and leaving his armor in its wake. Loki, too, let the illusion over him slip away, and somehow, the uncharacteristic lack of melodrama in the transformation was the breaking point for Thor. He charged with a roar.

Loki dashed forward to meet him, knife in hand. He slipped in too close for Thor to engage him with his whole strength, forcing him into short thrusts and jabs instead of proper swings. Thor managed to shoulder him away briefly, earning a slash across his bicep, then feinted a swing at Loki as he stepped back. He hit the ground instead, sending out a wave of electricity that made his brother stumble. The next swing Loki deflected off the blade of his knife and lightning danced on the metal.

 _Good_ , Thor thought, as Loki grimaced at the shock. _Feel something. Feel_ **_something_**.

They traded a series of flashing blows as Thor tried to aim not for Loki but for the knife. Loki spun off the last one and the knife came up — by sleight or spellcraft, it was now in Loki’s left hand — for Thor’s throat in a jab that nicked his chin as he jerked back out of the way. He’d played it off as a strategic move but Thor saw how he was trying to shake the numbing pain out of his right hand.

Before Loki could push back in, Thor flung Mjolnir at him. Loki stepped around it — expecting Thor to further retreat and try to push the distance between them. Instead, Thor dashed in behind the hammer and slammed a vicious kick straight into Loki’s ribs, sending him staggering back.

Thor recalled Mjolnir as Loki recovered and the hammer clipped his knife hand as it returned. When he went to deflect Thor’s next swing, his grip gave out and the hammer thudded into his hip. Loki rolled with the blow to lessen its impact, falling to the ground and tumbling back up to one knee. He pulled another knife from the air, and this time when Thor threw Mjolnir, Loki flicked his blade out at it as it spun past him to disrupt its flight, and it plowed into the ground behind him. He pushed himself to his feet and circled, and when Thor made as if to charge at him again, Loki flipped the knife over and threw it at him. Thor ducked and felt it graze his shoulder.

Loki turned _just so_ as he went to sidestep, and his injured leg gave out beneath him, sending him to his knees in the grass.

Thor reached for Mjolnir and swung, a wild backhand strike aimed to knock Loki’s head clean off his shoulders if he didn’t dodge.

He didn’t dodge.

The whole movement took less than a second but it seemed to stretch into an eternity.

Lightning bled from Thor’s hand, leaving a trail of blinding light across his vision.

Loki flinched, braced himself, but didn’t move.

Thor’s hand sliced across, unimpeded.

He froze, a cold dread creeping through his veins in the realization of what had just transpired.

He stared down at Loki, saw his own horror and shock mirrored up at him in his brother’s eyes.

And felt empty air clutched in his fist instead of Mjolnir’s handle. Slowly, both of them turned to look — to see Mjolnir lying where it had fallen.

It began to rain.

Thor’s thoughts felt sluggish, disjointed. _You would have killed him,_ he thought. _You would have killed your brother, and he would have let you._

Thor shivered. It was not the rain’s fault. He raised his hand and called Mjolnir.

It didn’t move.

_You would have killed your brother. You would have murdered your brother in cold blood. You are unworthy. Unworthy. Unworthy._

The hammer shuddered, leaned, then tumbled back toward him.

Past him.

Thunked into the hand of someone behind them. Again, as one, they turned to look.

“So,” purred Hela, dropping her hammer to her side. “These are the sons of Odin.”

 

*

 

“Not impressed,” she admitted evenly.

“You must be Hela,” said Thor, “I am Thor, son of—”

“Actually,” Hela cut him off, “You’re not, really. Are you?”

“Excuse me?” said Loki.

Hela turned Mjolnir over in her hand, examining it. “‘Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.’ Interesting.” She dropped it to swing it by its leather strap — slowly, as if to test it.

“Tell me, little brother… what were you the god of, again?” She eyed the roiling storm clouds and smirked.

Thor straightened as Hela began to spin the hammer faster. He felt like a mortal again, standing helpless but defiant before the Destroyer. “I am Thor,” he said, “God of Thunder.”

“Not if you’re not worthy, you’re not.”

She flung Mjolnir just as Loki tackled him. Thor felt the static on his face as it passed, lightning streaming after it. Loki rolled to his feet and darted toward her, a long knife flashing in each hand.

Hela chuckled. “You’ve certainly got your second wind, haven’t you?” She batted away Loki’s flurry of slashes with her bare hands — the blades never touched her. “What is this,” she asked, “Brotherly love for your would-be murderer?”

Loki laughed, disengaging to regain his footing. “Clearly you’re an only child,” he said. He grinned at her, eyes glittering, and suddenly he was once again the brother Thor remembered. “We’ve been trying to kill each other since the day we were born. I imagine mother and father had to watch us like hawks to keep us from strangling one another in our crib.”

“Twins? How charming. No wonder you’re so quick to forgive.” Hela manifested a twisted black sword in each hand and they circled one another.

Thor hung back. He knew this trick. When Hela was mostly turned away from him — her attention fully on Loki and his banter — he saw the telltale glow of Loki’s seidr as a conjured sword glimmered into existence before him. He snatched it up and dropped into sync with the two duelists, keeping just out of Hela’s direct line of sight, and waited for his cue. Whatever they were to each other — brothers, enemies, both — they had somehow decided they were united against _her_. _Better the devil you know_ , Thor thought.

“To be _completely_ fair,” Loki was saying, “It’s really _me_ who typically does the backstabbing in this family.” The point of his knife burst through her chest from behind as he let the illusionary Loki she’d been watching disappear. Thor rushed toward her, swinging for her throat.

Hela gave a scream of rage, parrying Thor’s blade with one sword and jabbing back at Loki with the other.

“ _Witch_ ,” she hissed.

Loki was stumbling back, curled defensively around a wound to his torso, but Thor couldn’t see how bad it was.

When he caught Loki’s eye, his expression worried, Loki flashed him a reassuring — if pained — grin.

“Shallow,” he said. Thor wasn’t sure whether to believe him.

“You two are really starting to piss me off.” Hela reached behind her back to pull the knife out. She didn’t seem overly injured by it.

Thor rushed her, Loki’s conjured steel sparking off the black metal of Hela’s blades. Thor wished Loki had thought — or had the time? or energy? — to loan him a second blade. No matter how he pressed the attack, all he earned was cut after cut.

In his peripheral vision, he saw a black blade darting in for his eye.

Then the flash of Loki’s knife as he hooked the blade on his own.

Between the three of them, the air was filled with blades. Hela was everywhere at once and her swords twisted and writhed to catch theirs. Thor would have been awed by her if he wasn’t already filled with anger and confusion and terror.

Loki stepped around her, twisting her arm beneath his blade to pin it and create an opening for Thor, who disarmed her other hand.

Or so he thought.

In the half a second it took for him to realize that she’d dropped the blade in order to summon Mjolnir, the hammer was already speeding past him. She turned, drawing back to elbow Loki in the jaw and send him staggering and then, before Thor could properly move out of the way—

_WHAM._

The rain was going suddenly in the wrong direction. Directions. The whole world wheeled around him. He thought he heard Loki shout his name but couldn’t be sure over the deafening crack of lightning. His heart sputtered, his body burned, the ground leapt up to slam into him.

Thor watched sparks dance before his eyes for a second before he realized he was looking up at the clouds. The rain was almost pleasant, falling in big heavy drops like tears. The realization that he couldn’t breathe was almost an afterthought.

“I suppose Father never told you about me,” Hela said, “Which means we haven’t been properly introduced. I am Hela, the Goddess of Death.”

Thor sucked air into his unwilling lungs. Hela’s voice fell around him like the rain.

“I was Odin’s executioner as he pillaged and plundered the realms of Yggdrasil. With me at his side, we conquered nine of them — and then one day he just… decided he was going to be a benevolent king. Foster peace, protect life… have _you_. My ambitions were bigger. Asgard was meant to rule all others. So what was I to do? Conquered one pathetic little world — wiped out one worthless race of monsters — and he tossed me away. Caged me like an _animal_. You perfect little princes can’t even imagine.”

She loomed into Thor’s sight as a wicked headdress of twisted black metal warped into existence around her face. In her hand, Mjolnir swept in slow, cruel arcs.

“Enjoy Valhalla, brother,” Hela said, drawing back Mjolnir. The clouds swirled above her, lightning flashing through them.

Something heavy fell over Thor and Hela balked in confusion as she looked over him — through him, flicked her eyes this way and that. Hands were grabbing him, lifting him up, but he couldn’t see them or even his own when he lifted them before his eyes. It was surreal.

He was invisible. They were _invisible_.

All at once the static cleared from Thor’s brain and he stumbled to his feet. He felt Loki find his wrist and start pulling him. They managed to get out of the way just as Hela slammed Mjolnir into the ground with a crash of lightning and a cry of frustration.

They ran, the grass whipping around their legs as the wind picked up. “A bit too much of mother in you for my liking,” Hela snarled. “Why don’t I show you what real power looks like?!”

Thor looked back to see her raising her arms. The air around her filled with a sharp, swirling darkness that exploded into a hail of blades. Thor jerked Loki’s hand, tackling him as the swords soared over them, one of them clipping Thor’s forehead. When Loki got up again, he pulled Thor in a slightly different direction.

Thor was looking back, watching Hela as she turned this way and that, as she started to summon another wave of weapons. In front of him Loki stopped and released his arm and Thor turned to see they were at the edge of the cliff. He was trying to find a silent, invisible, _fast_ way to ask Loki what his plan was when his brother unceremoniously shoved him off the edge.

Thor hit the beach hard, doing his best to minimize the damage to his unseen limbs. Loki landed beside him a heartbeat later. Perfectly, of course; Thor could tell by the imprint he left in the sand that he’d hit the ground in a roll and gotten his footing immediately.

Loki’s hand almost immediately hit him in the face, groping for his shoulder, then down his arm to pull him up and get him running again. Thor felt himself pulled down the beach into the sea, and then back at a sharp angle into deeper water that stung his wounds. Black blades rained down the beach, following the trajectory of their footprints. Loki didn’t stop, dragging them through the surf toward some rocks.

Hela landed with a thud in the same spot they had. She swept her eyes over the sand, then started to spin Mjolnir.

“Brace yourself,” Loki hissed.

She held the hammer to the sky and brought it down with a bolt of lightning straight into the sea. Electricity crackled out in sparks across the waves, and Thor felt it buzz unpleasantly through him.

Hela stalked down the beach away from them and approached something in the water.

A person, Thor realized, his heart lurching. A second body was floating facedown not far from it, the waves pushing them toward the shore. Thor realized with a start that the body he was staring at was his own.

Hela blasted them again, and Thor saw them disappear in a burst of softly-glowing stardust, as Odin had.

Sometimes Loki’s power and ingenuity was truly disturbing, Thor thought, as Hela threw Mjolnir into the sky and let herself be dragged away with it.

 

*

 

She was gone.

They were exhausted, not just hiding, Thor tried to convince himself as the minutes bled past. Thor’s heart was pounding and he could hear and feel Loki’s ragged breathing. Finally, they peeled themselves from the rocks and dragged themselves back onto the beach. Thor turned toward where he thought Loki probably was and sat heavily back onto the sand.

The first thing Thor saw of himself was his knee, gleaming slowly back into existence in front of him as the invisibility spell unravelled. Loki was standing a few feet away, one hand pressed hard into his side. Thor could see water-thinned blood seeping out between his fingers.

“How bad is it?” Thor heard himself ask.

“I’ll live,” Loki grumbled. He limped to Thor and offered him a hand, which Thor took without argument. Too tired. The brothers set off down the beach, leaning heavily on one another.

Thor’s brain was filled with a seething chaos that he couldn’t get a hold of. His father, dead. Hela, free. Loki, his brother, not his brother. All of this, Loki’s fault, his fault. His hand, with no hammer in it. His unworthiness, the only reason Loki’s head was still attached to his shoulders. Through all of it, the question: what now? What could he do? He flailed desperately to find some actionable direction and failed. Adrift, helpless.

 _All right,_ he thought, _action one: stop feeling sorry for yourself._

Stop feeling sorry for himself, find somewhere safe, rest. There. That felt better.

He staggered, losing his train of thought, as Loki suddenly stopped helping to hold him up. Thor turned to see that he’d fallen to one knee.

Loki hissed in pain and annoyance. “I’m fine,” he said, to Thor’s concerned look. He used Thor’s offered hand to steady himself as he pushed himself back to his feet.

A few steps later, he’d fallen again. This time he didn’t get back up. “Just give me a moment,” he said, and Thor was struck by the weariness in his voice. “Just a moment.”

“Sure,” said Thor.

The soft glow of a town could be seen in the distance, through the rain. It didn’t seem to be on fire, nor could Thor hear any panicked screaming, so that probably fit the definition of “safe” well enough.

Beside him, Loki said, “I don’t think I can get up.”

Thor bent down and let Loki throw an arm over his shoulders, then hauled his brother to his feet. Thor felt an involuntary shudder ripple through Loki with every other step. After a few feet, when Thor could see him starting to buckle again, he stopped and just swept his arm under Loki’s shaking legs and picked him up.

Thor added _make sure Loki isn’t dying_ to his mental itinerary.

In a voice so small Thor could barely hear it above the rain, Loki said, “I’m sorry.”


	2. Your Space Boyfriend is on the Phone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor phones a friend (or two) and makes sure Loki isn't dying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My plan was to post once a week on Mondays, but I have zero self-control in the face of people being so nice to me. Have a chapter. I already have the next one for Monday, so it's fine.
> 
> Fair warning: My plans for this fic are pretty nebulous. (I do know the ending I'm writing toward, though.) I'll tag major characters as they show up.

Thor leaned over the gas station counter.

“I’ve um… I’ve had an emergency, and I don’t have any coins for the pay phone outside,” he said, squirming nervously. He’d returned to his Midgardian clothes, which — miracle of miracles — were mostly dry. “Is there a phone I could use, or—”

“You all right, son?” The old man behind the counter asked, frowning. He made a gesture at the cut on Thor’s forehead.

Thor nodded. “My brother and I— we had an accident. Car accident. Because of the storm. We’re all right, we’re fine… I just want to call a friend, get a ride home.” The lies left a bitter taste in his mouth, and he got the sinking feeling that they hadn’t been very convincing, because the old man just stared at him.

After a moment, the man stood up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bill, then pecked some keys on the cash register to open it and exchange the bill for change. He held the coins out to Thor but stopped just shy of handing them over. He gave Thor a long, hard look.

“Are you Thor?”

Thor hesitated, then finally said, “Yes.”

“That was all you had to say, you know.” He handed over the coins. “Off savin’ the world?”

“I’m trying,” Thor said.

“Can’t ask for more than that.” As Thor turned for the door, the man said, “Hold on.” He puttered over to one of the aisles and picked something up from a bottom shelf, then walked over to hand it to Thor.

A first-aid kit.

All at once Thor remembered how much he loved humans, how much he loved Earth. He blinked back tears.

“Where’s your hammer?”

Thor stiffened. “It was stolen,” he not-quite-lied.

The man’s face twitched, “You know, we’ve got a myth about a time when that happened—”

Thor winced, “The uh… the one about me and Loki and a wedding dress?”

The man’s grin escaped despite all attempts to hold it back. “Is that one true?”

Thor felt a smile creeping onto his own face. “It was Heimdall’s idea.”

He left as the man cackled with laughter, feeling heartened despite everything.

 

*

 

Loki wasn’t where Thor had left him, despite the fact that Thor _specifically remembered_ telling him not to move. Despite the fact that Thor was relatively certain he could barely walk. Not unusually, worry fought with annoyance for domination where Loki was concerned.

Thor tried to remember whether _get help_ or _make sure Loki isn’t dying_ was higher on his to-do list and supposed that the latter was slightly more urgent. Maybe more than slightly — Thor’s eyes picked out a few drops of dark liquid on the pavement, then a trail of them. He followed them around the building until he saw a door — cracked open, with pale greenish light spilling out. He noted a smudge of dark blood on the handle and he pushed the door open, slowly.

Thor heard retching, and a wet splattering sound. Loki was bent over the toilet, his body heaving as he gulped for air. After a moment, he swallowed hard, flipped the toilet seat down, flushed, and sat, putting his face in his hands.

Thor gave him a moment before walking in. He put his fingers beneath Loki’s chin and lifted it as gently as he could manage.

“When did you hit your head?” he asked, trying to angle Loki’s face toward the light. His pupils looked normal.

“I didn’t.”

“Does it hurt?”

Loki pulled his face out of Thor’s hands. “I don’t have a concussion.”

Thor sighed but said, “Okay.” He crouched in front of Loki and plucked at his tunic. “Let me see how bad this is.” Loki didn’t fight him, which was good, because he didn’t know if he had the energy to fight back. He undid the clasp at the front of the tunic and peeled the left half away from his skin, wincing as the fabric stuck to the wound. Absurdly, he kept the right half wrapped around himself, as if Thor had never seen his brother’s naked chest before.

Maybe he was just cold. It _was_ cold. Unlike Thor, Loki hadn’t had a dry change of clothes.

In the dim light, the blood looked dark and strange. Thor did his best to clean the wound, which wasn’t quite _shallow_ (as Loki had described it) but at least didn’t look to be life-threatening.

“Does this mean we’re not fighting anymore?” Loki asked brightly, as Thor taped a gauze pad into place over the stab wound. Thor had the distinct urge to punch him in it.

“For the moment,” Thor said, rising to go rinse his hands off in the sink.

“Momentary lapses in fighting each other to fight whoever interrupted us is the story of our lives.”

“We didn’t always fight,” Thor said softly.

“Well, no,” said Loki, as Thor helped him up, “I _do_ remember occasional eating or sleeping.”

Thor fought down a smile and tried to remind himself that this was the way that Loki did battle: distract, divert, disappear. The knife always came eventually.

They lapsed into silence as they made their way back outside. Thor sat his brother on the curb in front of the gas station and had turned toward the pay phone when he heard Loki speak.

“I didn’t—” he cleared his throat. He wasn’t looking at Thor. “I didn’t mean for things to turn out this way.”

How many times had Thor heard those words, at the end of one of Loki’s pranks-gone-wrong? It was the closest Loki would ever come to an admission of guilt.

“No,” said Thor, “I don’t suppose you could have predicted Hela.”

Loki took a breath, as if to protest, then let it go slowly. He was still looking out at the rain, and his shoulders slumped a little. Deflated. Thor itched to know what he would have said — why that, of all the barbs they’d exchanged today, had been the thing that hurt him.

 

*

 

In his long life, Thor had leveled mountains, slain great beasts, toppled tyrants, and defeated armies. How hard could it be to remember a series of numbers?

He had the receiver to his ear but his fingers hovered uncertainly above the buttons. He’d scoured his memory but only two phone numbers had come to mind and Natasha’s had given him a no-longer-in-service message. Surely he knew Steve’s, or Tony’s, he thought. He could picture the phones themselves. Tony’s state-of-the-art transparent Starkphone, Steve’s SHIELD-issue flip phone that Tony called “stupidly outdated” and Steve called “makes phone calls and nothing else because I have a computer for the rest of that, dammit.”

Surely he could remember. It had only been a couple of years — the blink of an eye.

Thor looked at the change in his hand, sighed, and plugged in the only other number he could remember.

The line rang. _Please don’t be screening your calls_ , he thought, pretty sure that was the correct term for “letting them go to voice mail and then never checking them.”

There was a click and then a half-asleep, _“Huh?”_

“Darcy!” Thor said, relieved, “It’s Thor. Don’t hang up.”

_“Wha-at? I’m not gonna hang up on you. Holy crap how are you? It’s been like twenty years. Whatever, I know you want to talk to Jane. JANE. YOUR SPACE BOYFRIEND IS ON THE PHONE—is there any more coffee by the way? Thanks.”_

Thor wanted to tell Darcy he loved her but couldn’t find the words to not make it weird, so instead he said, “Thank you, Darcy. I hope the coffee’s good.”

_“It’s terrible, Eric made it like two hours ago. How’s the search for the uh—the things. The magic—HEY.”_

There was the sound of a scuffle. _“Give me—give—”_ and _“I am HAVING a CONVERSATION—”_

Then, _“Thor?”_

“Jane,” he said. No other words would come.

There was a quiet moment in which Thor could hear Darcy grumbling about the theft of her property in the background. _“Are you still there?”_ Jane asked. _“Are you okay?”_ Darcy stopped talking.

“I’m here. I’m… I’ll be fine—”

_“Do you need help? What’s wrong? What’s happening?”_ Muffled, he heard _“is he okay?”_

They were so good, his friends. Thor’s heart ached.

“I _am_ okay,” he said, “But I do need some help. This was the only number I could remember and I need to call… somebody.” He tried to think of whose number they might reasonably have. Banner? Banner did science, right? Did he even have a phone? Was he still missing? “You don’t have Tony Stark’s number, do you?”

_“I’ve got — hold on — I’ve got the uh… the business card for the CEO of Stark Industries? Darcy— no, Darcy I don’t know what’s going on, it’s probably an Avengers thing. Stop. Oh, but it’s— no… Virginia Potts? Is that helpful at all?”_

“Yes! Yes, thank you. That’s perfect.” She read him the number and he repeated it. “Thank you. Everything’s going to be fine.”

_“Are you sure?”_

Thor hesitated.

_“Thor?”_

How much could he tell her? Where could he even start? “The Allfather is dead,” he said, finally.

_“Thor—”_ she was quiet for a moment, and then, _“You’re not alone, are you?”_

He laughed a little. “No, uh. My brother’s here. He’s alive, apparently.”

Another long pause. _“That little shit.”_ Then, _“Oh my god, Thor. He didn’t— He didn’t—”_

“No! No. He… he was just old.” Thor thought of Stephen Strange, telling him that Odin had chosen to remain in exile. Thought of Odin, telling them that if Hela reached Asgard she’d be unstoppable. “Loki couldn’t have known.” That was it, that was what he’d decided, at least until Loki gave him a reason to think something else. He looked over at the curb in front of the gas station, where Loki was sitting, cautiously sipping the iced coffee that his bruised face had earned from the kindly gas station attendant.

_“Are you… I mean… where are you?”_

“I’m in Norway,” Thor said.

_“Norway?”_ (muffled, he heard Darcy say, _“Oslo?”_ ) _“Darcy, shh.”_

“Thank you, Jane,” said Thor. “Thank Darcy for me.” He didn’t hang up. He didn’t want to.

_“Of course,”_ she said. _“I mean — it’s just a phone number.”_

_“For the love of god, Thor, PLEASE come kiss her you should SEE her FACE—”_

_“Oh my god, Darcy, shut up. Listen, Thor, I’m gonna let you go, I know you have to make a call, just… call me back, later, okay? Let me know you’re okay.”_

“I love you.” It slipped out, completely out of habit.

_“Love you, too— I mean— um…”_ she hung up.

Thor hung up the pay phone.

“Smooth,” he said to himself, rubbing his temples.

 

*

 

Pepper looked at him fondly over the Spider-Man suit blueprint he was nitpicking. “This is going to be done before dinner, right?” she prompted.

“Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s practically done now,” Tony said. Practically. Every time he looked at it, he found something he needed to fix, just a little.

He tossed out the new glove design. “This is crap, the old one was fine, I don’t know why I thought I should change it.” Then he pulled it out of the trash and put it in his scraps folder, just in case.

Pepper grinned at him. “I’ll set an alarm,” she said, and kissed his cheek.

Tony opened up the new glove design again. Okay, not _total_ trash. There were a couple of ideas he could use.

Pepper tapped at his phone.

“No, it’s fine. I can leave this for later if I'm not done by tonight. It’s date night.” No, actually, it _was_ better. He pulled it out of the scraps folder and put it back.

“I’ll set two alarms.”

“We’re checking out that new sushi place, right?” Tony said. He hid the new gloves so he could look at the old gloves. Yeah, an improvement. Definitely. Maybe.

Pepper didn’t answer.

“Sushi? Right?” Tony asked. Pepper was staring at her phone, which was buzzing. She waved her hand at him.

“Do I know anyone in Norway?”

Tony shook his head. “Let it go to voicemail,” he said, as she answered it.

“Stark Industries, how can I help you?”

“Are you forwarding work calls to your cell on the weekends now because I thought we agreed—” Pepper put up her hand to silence him.

“Sweetheart, you’re not a bother. He’s right here. Hold on.”

“Who’s ‘Sweetheart’?”

“It’s Thor,” said Pepper, turning over her phone. “He didn’t have your number.” Quieter, she said, “He sounds tired.”

“What is it? Is it aliens? Robots? Odinson family drama? When did you get a phone? Why is your phone in Norway?”

_“It’s good to hear your voice, Tony.”_

Tony pretended he wasn’t unexpectedly moved by that. “You okay? You sound tired.”

_“I don’t even know where to start. Family drama? Yes. Aliens? Just one. Well. Me, too. And…”_ he trailed off.

“World in peril?” Tony asked. Pepper sighed.

_“I’m afraid so.”_

“How bad are we talkin’?” He covered the mic and said, “FRIDAY, can I get a trace on this?” as he walked to a nearby computer screen.

“Right away, boss.”

There was silence on the line.

“You still there, big guy?”

_“Tony…”_

“What? What is it?”

_“Loki’s here.”_

Tony suppressed a shudder and stretched his shoulders instead. “Him again,” he said.

Pepper looked up from where she’d wandered off to give him space. Her eyes were wary. _“New York?”_ she mouthed. God, she was sharp.

_“No— He’s not the problem—”_

“Sure sounds like a problem,” Tony snapped, more harshly than he’d intended.

Thor was silent again, and this time Tony didn’t say anything. The display showed a map of Norway and a blinking dot on the coast was labeled _incoming call_.

_“Tony…”_ the voice on the other end of the line was plaintive. Bright red warning lights were flashing in Tony’s brain, and he heard again Thor saying _it’s good to hear your voice_. The need to not alienate another friend fought viciously against his desire to never, ever get embroiled in another conflict involving aliens or Loki ever again.

_“I’m sorry, Tony,”_ Thor said, finally. _“I shouldn’t have called.”_

“Don’t you dare hang up.” Tony took a deep breath. “Tell me what’s happening.”

_“My—our father died,”_ Thor said, and Tony was unprepared for how his voice broke when he said it. He swore softly. _“We have a sister, and — it’s not fair, I know. It’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to Earth, but I don’t… I don’t know who else to call. The only numbers I could remember were Jane’s intern — she got Pepper’s number for me — and Natasha and her phone’s out of service or something.”_

Tony was suddenly _blisteringly angry_.

“I’m gonna come get you,” he said. “Don’t move.”

_“I don’t know where I am,”_ Thor said, and that was somehow even worse.

“I traced the call. I’m on my way. Stay there.”

_“I’m sorry, Tony.”_

Tony mentally kicked himself. “Stay there. I’m coming.” He didn’t hang up the phone until he heard the click of the receiver on the other end.

Tony started for the door, he stopped, turned to Pepper, who was following him. “It’s not enough that he broke up the team,” he said, “But now — now — I am _the only person on Earth_ Thor has to call for help. How messed up is that?”

“Tony,” she said gently. He handed her phone back to her before he threw it. He was shaking.

“The only person _on Earth_. Where the hell is he? Where the hell is Banner? SHIELD imploded. Where the hell is Fury? Who’s he supposed to go to? _Ross?_ Ross called him a ‘missing nuke,’ he’s not gonna give a shit if his dad died.” Tony knew he was rambling and he didn’t care. He was so angry at all of them. Thor wasn’t just an Avenger, he was a _friend_.

“Quinjet’s ready, boss,” said FRIDAY.

Pepper squeezed his hand. He didn’t even remember grabbing it but he was really glad he did.

“I’ll cancel our dinner plans,” she said.

Tony sighed.

“It’s fine. We’ll get takeout. The usual for me and you and… what, like, _everything_ for Thor?” She smiled at him.

“It’s not just Thor,” he admitted. “His brother’s with him.”

“So two of everything,” she said. She frowned. “Brother, huh? The one that tried to take over the world?”

“The very same.”

“Is he trying to take over the world again?”

“Thor says he’s not a problem. Or not _the_ problem. I don’t know what’s going on. There’s a sister now, maybe? I don’t know. I just know he sounded weird and his dad died and he doesn’t have anyone else so I’m gonna go get him.”

She was nodding. “Yeah, of course. Go, go. Keep me updated. Bring him home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can not believe how nice you guys have been to me. Thank you _so much_ for your encouragement.


	3. Almost, But Not Quite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony picks up Thor and Loki. Meanwhile, Hela dredges up some allies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at that, I managed to get almost all the way to Monday without posting this. It is killing me, spacing out these chapters instead of just posting them as soon as they're finished.
> 
> Thanks, as always, for your support and encouragement. <3

“Imagine you’re alone on a battlefield. Would you rather have a nuke or a box full of grenades?”

Smith just stared at his companion as they trudged through the snow, down the winding cliff-side path toward the sea. Finally he said, “What the hell kind of question is that?”

“It’s the answer to your question,” said Basso.

Smith shrugged, exasperated. “Fine, okay, box of grenades. What does that have to do with HYDRA? Or Johann Schmidt? Or Tønsberg or literally _any_ part of my question, which was, ‘If Johann Schmidt found what he was looking for in Tønsberg then why the hell are we back here?’ in case you forgot in the seven seconds since I asked you.”

Basso laughed. “Do you think Schmidt actually believed in those Norse gods?”

“Well Thor’s real,” said Smith. “Probably, if he came out to this ass-end of nowhere to find an Asgardian artifact, yeah, he believed in them. What does this have to do with—”

“Schmidt was after the nuke,” said Basso. “Right? He wanted to take over the world. After SHIELD and that crap with the Inhuman, we’re not exactly in a position to be thinking of world domination.”

“So what’s the box of grenades?” Smith had to stop a moment and catch his breath. He brushed snow off the top of a big rock next to the path and sat on it. “Shit, it’s cold. Why are we up here at night, anyway?”

“You really don’t know?” Basso shifted from foot to foot, rubbing his arms.

Smith didn’t know which question Basso was referring to, but he didn’t know the answer to either, so he said, “No.”

“Look, so, there was a big battle, right? And after the battle, Odin left some artifact with the people of Tønsberg—”

“The Tesseract.”

“Right. And Johann Schmidt did like a decade of research to find out where that battle took place—”

“To find the Tesseract.”

“Right, but there was a _battle_ here.” Basso gestured at him to get up and started moving down the path again.

Smith reluctantly got up to follow. “So?”

“So? So a battle means soldiers fighting, which means soldiers dying, which means…” he trailed off as he started to round a bend, and stopped walking.

Smith jogged to catch up. “Basso? Which means?”

“Who the hell are you?” said Basso, staring toward the little inlet that had been their destination.

“Rude,” said a voice. Basso staggered back, and Smith realized there was a sword in his chest. Basso had a moment to stare at it in shock, and then fell backwards into the snow.

_Run_ , Smith told himself. _Run_. He was frozen. He turned, stiffly, to look at whatever had killed Basso.

She was beautiful. Beautiful and terrifying. In one hand, she held a hammer — _it looks like Thor’s hammer_ , Smith thought. In the other, a sword of writhing black metal squirmed into existence.

“Soldiers dying,” she said, stalking toward him, “Means _bodies_.” She pointed the sword at him and said, “Kneel.”

He knelt.

She smiled. “I like that. Good survival instincts,” she said. “I am Hela, daughter of Odin. Queen of Asgard. Goddess of Death.”

In the water behind her, something huge and dark stirred.

 

*

 

By the time the quinjet landed outside the town, the storm had mostly subsided, but the night was getting dark. Tony found the two brothers sitting on the curb outside a gas station, looking like a pair of kids whose parents had forgotten to pick them up after school.

Thor looked like he might be asleep; his head was resting on his arms, which were propped up on his knees. Loki was leaning back on his hands, his long legs stretched out in front of him. There was a dark bruise along the side of his face. His eyes were red-rimmed but alert — they caught Tony the moment he came into view and followed him as he approached.

Tony stopped about ten feet away and glared at him. Loki smirked.

“Where’s your heart, Tin Man?” he teased, his voice rough with exhaustion. He tapped the center of his chest and Tony was suddenly very aware that the last time he’d seen Loki sans muzzle, only the arc reactor had saved him from becoming Loki’s puppet.

“This new bullshit your fault?” Tony asked, edging toward them and reminding himself that the scepter Loki had used for those shenanigans was safely dismantled.

“Isn’t it always?” Loki replied, as Thor raised his head and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Tony,” Thor greeted him, sounding relieved. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” Tony looked Thor up and down as he stood. He’d sounded tired on the phone, but Tony hadn’t expected to find him actually _hurt_. There were half a dozen cuts that he could see and the careful way Thor moved and the way his breath hitched as he stood told Tony there were more injuries that he couldn’t. “What happened? You look like someone threw you in a wood chipper.”

Thor chuckled. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, home’s a pretty long trip from Norway even in a quinjet, so we’ll have plenty of time.” About ninety seconds into that trip, Tony had realized that he was going to have to tell Thor what had happened to the Avengers. The longer he could put that off, the better.

Thor hugged him, which Tony wasn’t expecting, and which bothered him slightly because it took Loki out of his line of sight. He patted Thor’s back.

“All right,” he said, after Thor had stepped back, “Grab the punching bag over there and let’s get out of here.”

Tony pretended not to notice Thor wince at that, or how Loki only stood, shakily, with Thor’s help. Or the way he limped heavily the entire way to the quinjet. For all he’d told himself that it would be satisfying to see Loki beat to a pulp, it turned out to be merely uncomfortable — a disturbing reminder that he was, in fact, an actual person.

Not to mention — what the hell could do this sort of damage to a pair of Asgardians anyway? Tony hoped the fact that Thor was cut and Loki was bruised meant that the answer was just _each other_ , but he suspected otherwise.

“So,” said Tony, as FRIDAY set a course for the Avengers facility, “Start talking.”

Thor shifted uncomfortably, hesitating.

“Do you recall the Convergence?” Loki asked, neither uncomfortable nor hesitating.

Tony wanted to ignore him. Instead he said, “Yeah. What, like seventy-two hours of gravitational anomalies culminating in Instagram exploding with pictures of Thor fighting aliens in London, right?”

Loki looked at Thor, who said, “Yeah.”

“Right,” said Loki, “Well. During the confusion I may have faked my death, bewitched my father, and usurped his throne.”

“You _may have_.”

“Precisely.”

Thor glared at his brother, “And stranded him alone to die on a strange world, don’t forget that.”

“Oh please,” Loki said dismissively. “It’s not as if I dumped him into a pool of lava on Muspelheim. I put him in a retirement home in New York. The only injury he suffered was to his pride.” Despite his tone, he was squirming under Thor’s scathing gaze. He turned back to Tony to avoid it. “Anyway. Thor came back from his little scavenger hunt and found me—”

“—And found you making a mess of the Nine Realms in our father’s absence,” Thor grumbled.

Loki suppressed a grin. Barely. “It’s not as if you came back to find Asgard _on fire_ or anything.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t so bad. I adopted a policy of military nonintervention and invested in the arts—”

“You wrote a play about your own tragic death while our allies were forced to deal with invaders without the support of the einherjar!”

“—until Thor cleverly saw through my disguise—”

“The statue was _thirty feet high_ and made of _solid gold_ , Loki.”

“—and I was forced to reveal Father’s whereabouts.”

“In a _retirement home_ in New York,” Tony said, trying and failing not to be amused.

“See? _I_ thought it was funny.” Loki sighed. “I didn’t expect him to actually die. He’s been threatening it for like two hundred years.”

“So how did you end up in Norway?” Tony asked.

“What’s Norway?”

“It’s where Father decided to live out his exile after he broke free of your spell,” said Thor. To Tony, he explained, “In New York we encountered a sorcerer—” Loki scoffed “—who told us where to find him.” He smiled over at his brother. “Loki spent the duration of that meeting… detained.”

“I spent the duration of that meeting screaming in terror as I fell endlessly through the void,” Loki said, glaring at Thor. “It was traumatic.”

“That’s what you get for trying to invade Earth.”

“I didn’t _say_ it wasn’t deserved, I said it was _traumatic_.”

“So where did the wood chipper come in?”

“Oh,” said Thor. “ _Hela_.”

“When we found him, Father helpfully let us know that when he died, the spells that kept his murderous firstborn daughter contained would unravel and if she managed to get to Asgard, she’d return to her full power and conquer the known universe,” said Loki lightly. “Then he died.”

“So, she’s you but worse.”

Loki thought about that, took a deep breath, and said, “That’s… not inaccurate.”

“Then she… came and kicked the shit out of you?”

“And stole Mjolnir.”

Thor gave Loki a strange look that Tony couldn’t parse. Muted surprise or confusion. He didn’t interject this time; instead, he looked thoughtful.

“And stole—” Tony looked at Thor, “I thought only you and very nice robots could pick it up.”

Thor slumped a little, “You have to be _worthy_.”

“Or perhaps just stronger than Odin,” suggested Loki. Thor looked at his hands.

Tony sighed. “No idea where she went after that?”

Thor shook his head and Loki shrugged.

“So, to recap, we’ve got a homicidal Asgardian warrior princess loose somewhere on Earth.”

“ _Genocidal_ ,” Loki corrected helpfully, “And probably insane. She’s been alone in a prison dimension for at least as long as we’ve been alive. It only took a couple of weeks falling through the endless nothing between worlds to unhinge _me_ , I can’t imagine she’s anything less than _barking mad_.”

“Almost enough to make me feel sorry for her,” said Thor.

“Doesn’t quite cover hitting you with your own hammer, though, does it?”

“It really doesn’t, no.”

Tony tried to look like he was listening instead of trying not to throw up as the words “weeks falling through endless nothing” echoed repeatedly in his head. The concerned look Thor shot him told him he hadn’t _quite_ made it. He got up and checked the console to make sure FRIDAY was on course. She was.

“Oh—” Tony snagged the handle of a plastic bag he’d stuffed between the front seats and tossed it to Thor. “You’ve been in space for a couple years so I didn’t know if you’d need a change of clothes. You look all right, but Tweedledum looks like he fell in the ocean.”

“I went for a swim,” Loki said, as Thor handed him the bag.

“Good weather for it.”

“Nothing like the storm-tossed surf to soothe a new stab wound.” Loki pulled a shirt from the bag and held it up — grey, with a distressed likeness of the Captain America shield on it. He scoffed. “How did you know I was a fan?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Are those Steve’s clothes?” Thor asked, turning away as Loki started pulling off his damp clothing.

“Well, I didn’t think mine would fit you, and Vision doesn’t wear clothes, so.”

“Vision?” Loki asked. Steve’s jeans were loose on him; they slid down around his hips. His body was a patchwork of bruises and burns, and in the center of his chest, a dart of blackened flesh stood out like a tattoo.

Curiosity made Tony want to ask about it, but he also didn’t want to seem like he cared. (He didn’t.) Loki caught him staring and raised an eyebrow.

“My robot son,” said Thor.

“Uh, excuse you. _My_ robot son,” said Tony.

“Fine, _our_ robot son.”

“You barely did anything!”

Both of Loki’s eyebrows were raised now. When they offered no further explanation, he just said, “I can’t talk, I’ve done weirder things.”

He carefully folded his Asgardian clothes in his lap, then made them disappear with a little glimmer of chartreuse light. He crossed his arms and leaned back in his seat, looking suddenly very tired.

“Thank you, again, Tony,” Thor said earnestly. “I’m surprised you came yourself. I thought you were retiring?”

“Yeah. I’ve been… you know. Keepin’ house. Trying to help outside the field. Lookin’ after new recruits.” He cleared his throat.

Tony could _feel_ Thor patiently waiting. It was growing like a physical creature, making the space inside the quinjet smaller with each passing moment. Loki, oblivious, had shut his eyes and probably gone to sleep.

Tony spent what seemed like several years fidgeting and looking at literally anything other than Thor — at one point even getting up to check the quinjet’s course again.

Thor finally said, “Tony.”

“Hm?” Tony said casually.

“What’s going on? Who died?”

Tony sighed. “The Avengers.” He got up to pace. To Thor’s confused look, he said, “The team. Nobody died, but… the team’s… over. Broke. I made decisions Steve didn’t like, he made decisions I didn’t like, everybody kept secrets, told lies. We couldn’t work it out. He walked out, and he took — everybody. Everybody but Vision and Rhodey, and Rhodey’s… he got hurt. He’s out of commission, for now at least. There’s a kid in Queens, but he turned it down, for now, anyway.”

“No word of Banner?”

“Nothing.”

Thor sat back, digesting. Tony chanced a look at Loki and he was awake, regarding Tony with half-closed eyes, expression unreadable.

“Yeah, all the crap you pulled and it turns out all you had to do was wait and we tore each other apart, no mind control necessary.”

“Mm.” Loki just nodded. “Fury was wrong about you.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“He thought you all just needed a push to come together, but that’s not really how it works. I thought it would take you longer to fall apart, but that’s how mortals are, I suppose. You do everything faster.” The worst part, Tony thought, was that the way he said it was almost _kind_.

“You know,” said Tony, “I don’t really think I like how you talk about it like you know literally anything about any of us. Since, you know. You don’t.”

“Oh no,” said Loki, “I only machinated the events that necessitated bringing you together and then invited every one of you personally. How dare I presume to be involved. Also, I read all your files so I do kind of know a little bit about—”

“Loki, stop,” said Thor. He sounded tired.

“You all put me through _so much_ for being a liar,” Loki huffed, “but the moment I start speaking truth nobody wants to hear it. What _exactly_ is it you wish of me, I wonder?”

“ _Silence_ ,” snarled Thor.

Loki laughed. “There it is,” he said, nodding. He dropped his head back against the wall of the quinjet with an audible _thunk_.

Thor plied Tony for a few more details of what had happened, but he didn’t look at his brother again. Loki, for his part, stared at the door and spoke not another word for the whole trip.

When Tony chanced a glance at him, his face was pinched with anger and his eyes were bright with unshed tears. It was almost enough to make Tony feel sorry for him.

But not quite.


	4. Bad Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Thor finally gets some sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING:  
> In case you didn't catch the update to the tags, there may be some disturbing imagery in this chapter. (I was gonna say that I don't think it's that bad but frankly, I read Animorphs as a kid -- nothing has phased me since like the fifth grade.)

Night had rushed across the Atlantic to New York ahead of them, and when the quinjet landed at the Avengers Facility it was dark.

“Hey FRIDAY, what time is it?”

“Eight o’clock, boss. Still time for your date.”

“Uh. Yeah. Thanks, FRIDAY.”

Thor chuckled. “Oh no,” he said, “Is it Saturday? Did I interrupt date night?”

“Yes, you did, actually,” said Tony, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “It’s a good thing you called Pepper and not me, honestly. I would have just left you in Norway and went to get sushi.”

“Of course, of course. I’ll be sure to thank her.” Thor didn’t think for a second that Tony would have left him for sushi, but he was _absolutely_ going to thank Pepper when he saw her.

 _If_ he saw her. Thor glanced at Loki, hovering just off his left elbow, still stubbornly ignoring him. No way Tony was going to let Pepper get within ten miles of _him_.

Thor heard a phone ring and nearly ran into Tony when he stopped in the doorway into the rec room.

“Let” was really a very strong word when it came to Pepper Potts.

“FRIDAY told me your ETA,” she said from the couch.

“Traitor,” said Tony.

“Sorry, boss.”

The coffee table in front of her was covered in Chinese takeout containers, most of them still closed. Next to her — between her and the door — was Rhodey, eating lo mein with a fork straight out of the box. He nodded at Thor over Tony’s shoulder and said, “You look like—”

“—Like I lost a fight with a wood chipper,” Thor finished for him.

“I was gonna say like you _won_ a fight with a wood chipper, I just don’t know why you were fightin’ one in the first place.”

“It insulted my honor.”

Rhodey nodded. “Right. Just the usual, then.”

Tony didn’t move out of the doorway. He made a gesture at Pepper. “Uh, can I talk to you? Outside?”

Pepper got up and walked toward him, which was not the answer he was looking for. She made a shooing motion with her hands and said, “Do you mind? Moving? I’m gonna hug my friend here, I haven’t seen him in like two years and I heard he got some bad news, so.”

“For goodness’ sake, Stark. I’m not a mad dog,” grumbled Loki.

“Oh, are you talking again?” Tony jabbed, stepping aside reluctantly.

Loki slid past them into the room as Thor stepped over to Pepper to take the offered hug.

“Tony told me about your dad,” she said softly. She squeezed him so hard he thought he’d break, right then and there. Thor wanted to thank her, but he couldn’t say a word.

It was fine. She knew.

 

*

 

“Colonel Rhodes,” Loki said, nodding at him.

“Yeah, Rhodey, I’m sure you know Loki,” said Tony, “He invaded New York with an army of aliens.”

“Yeah I remember,” Rhodey said. He gestured at Loki with his fork and said, “You were duct-taped outside the shawarma place when I showed up late.”

Loki smiled only in the most literal sense of the word. “I remember.”

“So what happened to you?”

“My big sister punched me the face.” He sat stiffly on the couch opposite Rhodey, wincing, and added, “And stabbed me.”

“I take it that’s unusual for Asgardian family reunions?”

Loki frowned. “Honestly,” he said, “Not really.”

Thor ambled over to sit on the opposite end of the couch and looked over the food.

Tony took the opportunity to see Pepper out the door.

“What are you d—”

“I know,” she said, “And I’m not staying. But I remembered what you said. He hasn’t got anyone else.” She slid her arm around his waist. He let his head drop to her shoulder and blew out a sigh. “It’s okay,” she said.

She reached up and ran her fingers through the hair on the back of his neck, and Tony could feel her slowly untangling the knot in his chest. It was okay. It _was_ okay.

He didn’t know how long they stood there — long enough for the screaming terror that lurked constantly in the back of his head to ease itself into a comfortable (well, relatively) white noise.

“All right, fine. I’ll babysit. You two go on your date,” said Rhodey. Tony looked up to see him leaning in the doorway, shaking his head at them.

“Honestly, I don’t even want to leave _you_ under the same roof as him,” said Tony. Neither of them had to ask who he meant. “Hell, I don’t want to leave _Thor_ under the same roof as him.”

“He looks like a drowned cat,” said Rhodey. “I think I can take him.”

“Phil Coulson probably thought that, too.”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Well,” said Rhodey, “ _Vision_ can take him. Anyway, they’re both out.” He held up his phone.

“You have to be kidding me,” Tony said. “One: why did you take a picture? Two: did you use panorama to get all of Thor in this picture?”

“One: one day Thor’s gonna give me crap about my War Machine stories again and then, bam. Look at this picture of you passed out on the couch with your evil twin with a piece of General Tso’s hangin’ out of your mouth. Look at them. They are _holding hands_ , Tony.”

“I don’t know if that’s intentional.”

“I don’t care if it’s intentional, it’s blackmail. Two: if panorama was not invented to capture horizontal Asgardians at the greatest possible resolution, then I don’t know what the hell it’s for because I’ve never used it for anything else except by accident.”

Tony gave him a concerned look. “I feel like maybe you have some issues you need to work—”

“It’s a good story, Tony.”

Tony put his hands up defensively as Pepper stifled laughter behind her hand. “They look like _you two_ after a bad all-nighter.” She hooked her arm around Tony’s. “Still feel like sushi?”

Tony heaved a great sigh. “Yeah, what the hell. Go warm up the car, I’ll put the kids to bed.”

 

*

 

The piece of chicken was gone when Tony and Rhodey got inside.

“Do you think he ate it in his sleep?”

“Man, if anybody could eat in their sleep, it would be Thor.”

Tony and Rhodey looked at each other. Neither of them said the words but both of them could see the other thinking it. Rhodey looked at the container of General Tso’s. It was time to make a judgement call.

“No,” said Tony. “He’s suffered enough tonight. Next time.”

Rhodey nodded.

Tony patted Thor on the shoulder. Thor grunted.

“Come on, Chicken Wing, time to go to bed.”

Thor rubbed his face on his hands and nodded. “Thanks, Tony,” he said.

Tony gestured to Loki. “You can wake _him_ up.”

“Probably not,” Thor said. He nudged his brother with his foot and Loki didn’t so much as move.

“Is he dead?”

Thor just shook his head. “He could sleep through a dragon attack.” He hefted Loki off the couch and put him on his hip like a sack of potatoes. Loki put his arms around Thor’s neck like a sleepy toddler.

“We’re _sure_ that’s the guy that tried to take over the world, right?” Rhodey said, sitting down and going back to his lo mein.

“Pretty sure,” said Tony, aiming his phone camera as Thor shuffled toward the hallway.

“It’s him,” Thor rumbled.

Tony directed him to the empty room next to Vision’s, and wondered how to ask Thor to stay nearby and keep an eye on him. Thor dumped Loki onto the bed, shoved him over, and flopped down next to him.

“Okay, well,” said Tony. “You two are embarrassingly—” he gestured meaninglessly, knowing Thor couldn’t see him anyway. _Familiar_ didn’t have the tone he was looking for and _cute_ didn’t even start to cover it. They were _enemies_. Jesus. What had they been like when they were _friends_?

“Come talk to me when you and Rhodey have been brothers for a few centuries,” Thor said into his pillow.

Yeah, okay, that was fair.

“I’m not sure those pictures are gonna work as blackmail,” Tony said as he came back into the rec room. He paused on his way out the door. “Are we bad friends?” he asked.

A ping from Tony’s phone told him he had a text. _Avengers Send Help — Aliens Invading New York Again,_ said the text. The picture was attached. Maria Hill was CC’d on it.

“We’re definitely bad friends,” said Rhodey, putting his phone back in his pocket.

 

*

 

Loki woke in stages from the dreamless sleep of complete exhaustion. He didn’t know what had prompted him to awaken, but he had to fight the dizzying half-panic that comes from waking up someplace unfamiliar. Midgard, he reminded himself. Somewhere on Midgard.

He took stock. The bed was comfortable enough. One wall was nothing but windows, looking out onto a manicured lawn. The only light came from a cracked door, beyond which Loki could see what he thought was probably a bathroom.

Thor was next to him, sprawled across most of the bed while Loki was scrunched gracelessly into a tiny corner of it. This was fair, he supposed, as he had clearly stolen all of the covers. He stretched anyway, one limb at a time, twisting until joints popped and the previous day’s aches and pains made themselves more explicitly known.

“Loki.”

He growled senselessly in response. He hadn’t bothered Thor, so he didn’t know what he wanted and his brain was still too foggy to make any kind of complex response.

Thor was quiet.

Finally Loki grumbled, “What?” and rolled onto his back so he could look over. Nothing. Whatever he’d wanted, he’d fallen back to sleep. Fine. Loki folded himself back into his comfortable ball and tugged his corner of the pillow Thor had invaded back under his head and shut his eyes.

_“Loki.”_

The sound of his name yanked him back out of the sleep he’d been drifting into. _“What?”_ he whined.

Thor murmured incomprehensibly and Loki realized he was asleep.

Loki rolled himself over onto his other side— _oh, nope, no, definitely not, not on that hip, that still hurt_ — onto his _stomach_ and looked over at Thor.

“Are you mumbling my name in your sleep?” Loki asked, quietly enough not to wake him. He looked like he was dreaming, and Loki was deciding whether to wake him up when he remembered he was mad at him.

“Right,” he grumbled, “You’d prefer not to hear me talk at all. _Fine_. Drag yourself out of your own nightm—” Thor stretched and shifted and his elbow went straight into Loki’s face.

He didn’t _need_ to talk, Loki mused. He could wake his brother up with a nice gentle _knife in the torso_. He struggled to free his hand from the blanket and was getting ready to conjure something sharp when Thor said his name again.

Loki removed the arm from his face and glared at Thor. He turned a few more devious spells over in his head, as if he didn’t already know the one he wanted to cast.

“It’s not eavesdropping if you’ve invited me,” he said. “You’ve got nobody to blame for this but yourself.” Green-gold glittered softly over his fingers as he touched Thor’s temple.

 

_Wind. A desert of black ash whipped around him — blinding, stinging. Dark clouds hung low, veiling a sickly yellow sky. Loki felt his stomach sink._

_Svartalfheim._

_Loki took a deep breath through his mouth, told himself to feel the lack of grit on his tongue and throat. It wasn’t real. It was a dream, and while he wasn’t the master of it, he could leave whenever he wanted._

_Comfortable in his lucidity — he couldn’t very well spy on Thor’s dream if he lapsed into dreaming himself — he looked around. They were ringed by jagged dark mountains, the peculiar dream topography making a stage and backdrop for the only thing in it that mattered._

_Thor was struggling against the wind, struggling to reach a body lying a few feet from him that Loki knew must be his. He almost left then. Something sharp rose in his chest and he wrapped it in bitter anger, like an oyster making a pearl. This was not something Thor thought about, not something that bothered him, not something he had nightmares about. It couldn’t be. Somehow, this was a guilt trip — sentiment weaponized against him, like it always was._

_Morbid curiosity had its hooks in Loki. He moved closer. The wind didn’t bother him; he had no body — he was a projection, a drifting point of bodiless clairsentience._

_Dream-Loki was alive, wounded and gasping. His hands clutched desperately at his chest — Loki felt in his own chest the echo of that wound — but his eyes were on his brother._

_“Help me,” he begged, as Thor finally managed to drag himself to dream-Loki’s side. Loki did not remember begging any such thing. It irked him._

_“Shh,” Thor murmured soothingly. “It’s all right. I’m here.” There was an edge to his voice that Loki didn’t like. It dragged across his senses like nails on a chalkboard._

Of course, _Loki thought._ You’ve got to be the hero, don’t you?

_Thor was bent over him, trying to staunch the bleeding. Black blood bubbled up between his fingers. Dream-Loki’s skin was going grey, dark cracks spreading over his flesh like broken porcelain._

_“No,” Thor whispered, “No, no, no—” His voice rose, sharp, strained._

_“Brother, please—” dream-Loki begged._

You can’t bear the thought that I didn’t need you, can you? _Loki thought._ Can’t bear that I saved myself.

_There was too much blood — not blood, no, too dark, wrong. The edges of the wound had begun to crack like glass, caving in on itself, and inside was empty blackness._

_“It’s all right, it’s… no, no, please. Please stop…” Thor was panicking, trying desperately to hold Loki together as his brother’s body broke apart beneath his hands. The pool of not-blood beneath them grew until it looked like it could swallow them, like a yawning black maw. Loki looked down into it and saw stars._

_He wasn’t falling, Loki told himself, light-headed. It was a dream. A dream. His mouth was full of blood, his lungs were full of ash, his body was full of darkness, and it burned, burned, burned, and the void was opening up to swallow him—_

_“Wake up,” Loki said, and whether he was saying it to Thor or himself, he didn’t know._

 

Loki rolled back onto his side, away from Thor, and concentrated on making his breathing slow and even. Behind him, Thor was gasping for air like a drowning man. Loki couldn’t blame him.

Thor sat up, which was annoying, because Loki wanted nothing more than for him to go back to sleep so he could go to the bathroom and throw up. Again. He was still sure he didn’t have a concussion, he just had a lot of things to throw up about. Like gruesome visions of his own death. Or accidental patricide.

He shut his eyes and counted the seconds in between breaths, willing his mind to cease spinning.

He lost count when Thor leaned over him and wrapped an arm around him.

 _Sentimental oaf,_ Loki thought fondly. _I’m fine. Healthy, whole, and unbroken._ To be fair, Thor wasn’t the only one who needed the reminder - Loki’s arms had been wrapped around his chest since he’d pulled them out of the dream.

The first time Thor said it, it was too quiet to hear. He barely more than mouthed the words, and Loki caught only the pair of hissed sibilants.

The second time he whispered: “I’m so sorry,” and once more, “I’m so sorry, brother.” Loki felt Thor’s cheek pressed against the back of his shoulder as Thor hugged him softly. And then he pulled away, retreating back to his side of the bed.

Loki wanted to ask, _For what?_ For that idiocy with Mjolnir? Thor didn’t _honestly_ believe that a well-placed blow in the midst of combat could make him unworthy, did he? He’d been swinging that hammer around for the whole fight — any one of those hits could have critically injured Loki if he’d failed to anticipate them.

Loki hadn’t _really_ thought Thor would kill him. Stupidly, it wasn’t until _after_ Thor had followed through on the blow that Loki had realized he was in any danger.

If he was being honest (and he wasn’t, not at the moment) he had suspected Thor _would_ kill him, if Loki gave him the chance, or the excuse. Maybe that was why Loki had dived straight into the fight when Thor had started it — because that outcome wasn’t really so distant from the one Loki himself secretly wanted.

It was spite, he thought, with deadly seriousness. If not from that Odin-damned hammer, than from the Norns themselves. Whether it was Thanos plucking him from the roots of the world tree, or the cursed blood of the dark elf abomination, or Mjolnir having a change of heart mid-battle. Always, always, fate conspired toward his continued misery.

Loki let himself wallow in resentment until he was certain Thor had gone back to sleep. His nausea had subsided by then, but he limped to the bathroom anyway. He ran cold water over his hands and then put them to his face and breathed slowly until he felt calmer.

“ _Sorry_ ,” Loki said with a huff, glaring at Thor’s back. Loki supposed that meant he should forgive him for that quip in the quinjet. He shook out the tangle of blankets and laid them over the bed, then crawled under them, lying with his back pressed up against his brother’s. Some things were inevitable. By morning, Loki would once again have all the covers and Thor would have all the space, but for the moment, they could at least pretend they could be comfortable together.

There was an ache in his chest, and Loki pretended it was the memory of an old wound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you are writing and a character just does what they want, and in this chapter that character was Pepper Potts.


	5. Cosmic in Scale

Thor woke up to a knock on the door and an empty bed and immediately his half-awake brain was filled only with, _“Oh no.”_

“I’m awake,” he lied, sitting up. “Come in.”

Vision opened the door and nodded at him. “Nice to see you again, Thor.”

“Likewise,” said Thor, “What did he do?”

 

*

 

They found Loki pacing back and forth in the big training room adjacent to the quinjet hangar while Tony and Rhodey looked on with a sort of general apprehension.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Well,” said Tony, “He went outside, yelled at the sky, then came back in and said he was out of ideas. Then he said the rec room was too small for him to think and now he’s here. And then Rhodey—”

“I asked Vision if he thought he could take him in a fight and he said no,” Rhodey said, shaking his head.

“I _didn’t_ say I couldn’t take him. I said that if his magic is anything like Wanda’s, then combined with the understanding he probably has of this—” Vision tapped the infinity stone in his forehead, “—I would be at a severe disadvantage.”

“His magic isn’t like Wanda’s,” said Thor.

Vision said, “Oh.”

“He has hundreds of years of study and practice in arts both sorcerous and martial,” said Thor.

Vision said, _“Oh.”_

“It’s fine,” Thor said. “If he’s moving, it’s because he’s thinking. If he’s standing still, it means he’s scheming.”

“I was honestly really counting on you two for my sense of security,” said Tony. “So, you know. Thanks for letting me know how completely boned we are if he decides one of us has pissed him off or something.”

There was a loose screw on the ground. Thor picked it up and gave it an experimental toss.

“Remind me why we don’t just ask him what’s up again?” Rhodey asked.

“I have almost no evidence to support this,” said Tony, “But I just feel like he could probably throw me out a window with his bare hands.”

Thor aimed.

“And haven’t we all had that urge?” said Rhodey.

Loki let out a sharp yelp, clapping his hand to the back of his neck. He turned toward them, looked immediately at Thor, and gave a full-body expression that said, very clearly, _“what the hell.”_

“Just checking to make sure you’re really here,” said Thor. “What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you to wake up,” said Loki. “Why do I have an audience?”

“They thought you looked like you were ready to throw someone out a window.”

“I’m always ready to throw someone out a window.”

“You can’t do that on Earth. Humans are very fragile.”

“I _know_ ,” Loki huffed. “Anyway, defenestration has always been more _your_ style. I much prefer a good stabbing.”

“You can’t do that, either. It kills them.”

“I _know_ , Thor. I have, in fact, stabbed mortals before.”

“Yes, that’s _kind of_ the problem.” Thor beckoned him, “Come on, I’m hungry.”

“This conversation is making me really uncomfortable,” said Tony.

“Stop making the mortals uncomfortable, Thor,” said Loki. He walked toward them and the mortals in question scattered like pigeons. “ _Really_ ,” said Loki, with a sigh, “When have I ever initiated violence upon you without warning?”

That caught Tony off-guard. “Uh…” he looked thoughtful, “Attack on the helicarrier?”

“That was Barton,” said Loki, “I was in the Hulk box.”

Once they were back in the kitchen, Thor rummaged in the fridge for the remnants of the last night’s takeout.

“The time you threw me out a window?” Tony suggested, wincing as Thor basically just shoved everything into the microwave and slammed it. “Do you think you could be a little more gentle with that?”

“Sorry,” said Thor, pressing buttons. Gently.

“We had that pleasant chat first,” Loki said, in answer to Tony’s question. “Still waiting on that drink.”

“How about the time you stabbed Phil Coulson to death?”

“Who?”

Tony bristled with anger, looking like he was very much regretting not dumping Loki out of the quinjet and into the Atlantic when he’d had the chance. Thor put a hand on his shoulder.

“Oh, Loki,” he sighed, “Don’t make it worse.”

“Why do people always say that?” Loki asked, shaking his head, “How _exactly_ do you make killing a man _worse?_ As it is, it tends to burn bridges.”

“How many people did you stab to death during the Chitauri invasion?” Rhodey asked incredulously, watching Loki sink casually into a chair at the table.

“None, to my knowledge,” said Loki. “Wait — does throwing knives count as stabbing?”

“I’m gonna give that a yes,” said Rhodey, sitting down at the table about as far away from Loki as possible.

Loki looked thoughtful. “I stabbed a lot of people, then,” he said. “I didn’t _think_ I killed any of them but you mortals have turned out to be quite fragile.”

“Coulson was the SHIELD agent I met in New Mexico after Father banished me,” Thor explained, resisting the urge to throw Loki through a wall. “The agent you stabbed in the heart with that scepter _right in front of me_ before you tried to send me _plummeting to my death_.”

“Oh, him,” said Loki, “ _‘You lack conviction,’_ pfft. I _thought_ that was who you meant. I thought he got better.”

Thor rubbed his temples. “ _Humans_ do not _get better_ from _stab wounds_ through the _heart_ , Loki.”

Loki looked genuinely confused. “That’s not what Sif said.”

Thor stared at him. “What would Sif know about it?”

“She met with your SHIELD agents when I sent her to Midgard to track down Amora’s sister.”

Thor grimaced, setting food on the table. “How did Lorelei — oh, the prison breach, during the… what do you mean, _you_ sent her?”

Loki was reaching for the container of egg rolls in his hand. Thor pretended not to notice and kept “accidentally” pulling it out of reach.

“She had nothing but nice things to say about them — honorable warriors, et cetera, so I sent her back for the little Kree incursion, too.”

“The who what?” said Tony.

“Aliens,” said Thor. Tony looked alarmed.

“Do you people not talk to each other?” Loki had stretched halfway across the table from his seat. So far, he had been too busy talking to notice that Thor was being intentionally difficult. “Anyway, I’m sure she mentioned him. Are you just being an ass? Give me that.”

“What, this?” Thor dearly wished there was only one egg roll left so he could eat it out of spite, but there were three and if he tried it he knew Loki would manage to save at least one. Anyway, he knew getting stabbed (and he would _definitely_ get stabbed) would just upset Tony. He sat the container on the table and sat.

Tony was giving him a look. “Is Phil Coulson a common name?” Thor asked.

“Not _that_ common.”

“Afk Furry,” said Loki around a bite of the last egg roll. He had somehow already eaten the other two and Thor now amused himself by setting food in front of him and seeing what else he would inhale indiscriminately.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Rhodey said.

“Mm,” Loki swallowed, “Apologies.”

Tony stared at Rhodey like he’d either performed a miracle or grown an extra limb.

 

*

 

“So,” said Thor, “You tried to leave. Without me.”

Loki said, “Mm?”

“You tried to call down the Bifrost.”

“Oh,” said Loki, “I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work. I’ve been off the throne for more than twenty-four hours and the closest Asgard has to interim rule is the Warriors Three. I’m sure Heimdall’s back where he belongs and surer still that he won’t open Asgard to _me_ any time soon. Just testing the theory.”

“And what would you have done if your theory was incorrect?” Thor asked, frowning.

“Left you here to deal with Hela and gone back to my statues and my theater, naturally. Father’s dead, and as he stopped short of actually disowning me, my claim to the throne is no less legitimate than Hela’s. _You_ abdicated, if memory serves.”

“You’re a _criminal_.”

Loki shrugged. “Perhaps. But a criminal who has served Asgard for the last few years without strife or scandal.”

“The Realms are _in chaos_ , Loki —”

“The Realms are _always_ in chaos, Thor,” Loki said, sounding bored.

“This is like an episode of Game of Thrones,” Rhodey muttered.

“Mm. Not as sexy though,” Tony replied. He was kind of regretting the takeout. Popcorn would have been more appropriate.

Loki was saying, “It’s hardly my fault that you’ve only chosen _now_ to wander freely among them. Asgard has _never_ sent its armies to counter _every_ threat. The einherjar are a force reserved for larger-scale off-world invasions like the one _I_ perpetrated here.”

He said it so casually, as if trying to take over worlds was an everyday occurrence. Maybe it was.

“I could never have dared such a thing if the Bifrost had been intact. I have you to thank for that, I suppose.”

Ouch. _That_ definitely looked like it stung. “Do you perhaps recall the events that necessitated my breaking of the Bifrost?” Thor growled at him.

Loki’s eyes narrowed. “I _do_ recall, actually! It seemed some reckless prince of Asgard went down to Jotunheim against his king’s explicit wishes and started slaughtering its soldiers in a fit of bad temper. I hear the Jotun king declared war. Now, whoever solved _that_ little problem?”

“You did,” said Thor, half-standing, eliciting a thin-lipped smile from Loki, before adding, “With _murder_.”

Loki scoffed and rose to meet him. “I did to Laufey the same thing I did to you: I gave him but the opportunity to take his desires to action. Like _you_ , he _chose_ violence, and so violence was what I gave him.”

“And what of the rest of Jotunheim?!” Thor’s voice rose dangerously. They were both leaning over the table now, right in each others’ faces. “Hundreds of thousands of innocent people, Loki, what of them?”

“Not people,” Loki spat. “ _Monsters_.”

Tony and Rhodey exchanged looks as Thor lapsed into sputtering, wordless disbelief. Rhodey mouthed, _“Holy shit.”_

“Is that _racist_?” Tony asked, voice low. He _meant_ was that the right word, but Rhodey just gave him a “no shit it’s racist, dumbass” look and nodded sharply. “I mean—”

“People— _people_ , Loki. Not monsters. _People_. _Your_ people,” Thor objected desperately.

Rhodey flashed Tony a confused look.

It took Tony a second to realize, and then — _oh_. Shit. _“Adopted,”_ he mouthed. When Rhodey tipped his head at Loki for confirmation, Tony nodded. The rate at which the Asgardians were progressing from lightly aggressive repartee to figuratively ripping each others’ throats out was a little unsettling.

“That’s right,” Loki hissed, low and dangerous. “ _My_ people.” Somehow, the words claimed possession, not allegiance.

Thor seethed. “What gave you the right—”

_“I was king!”_

“The king of Asgard keeps peace in the Nine Realms! He doesn’t—”

Loki was shaking his head. “No. No, I— oh, do you _not_ know? Did Father leave out that little bit when he told you of my origins?” To Thor’s confused look, he said, “He _did_ , didn’t he?”

“Loki, _what_ are you talking about?”

Loki laughed and gestured dramatically: arms spread, palms up. “Did Father not always tell us that we were _both_ born to be kings, brother? He neglected to tell us on what throne we would sit. Golden Asgard for you, naturally, and for me?”

“Loki—”

“For me? That _wasteland_ , that frozen _ruin_. Odin didn’t just take in some poor orphan, Thor. He took the heir to Jotunheim’s throne. _Laufey’s son_.”

Thor fell back, his face horrified. He shook his head. Loki was nodding, suddenly cold, hard.

“Now you see,” Loki whispered. “ _Now_ you see me, brother.” Cold, hard, _fragile_.

Thor didn’t see it and Tony almost said something, but what? Some kind of warning? Even if he had had time to piece the thought together and articulate it, he wasn’t sure Loki deserved an advocate.

Thor grabbed Loki by the throat, dragged him toward him. “Then you have murdered _both_ your fathers, _kin-slayer_ ,” Thor roared at him. He shook him just once, hard, and Loki laughed — a sound like something rattling around, broken loose, inside him.

“Hey hey hey—” Rhodey had stood up. (When had he stood up?) He had a hand on Thor’s shoulder. “You two wanna fight it out, that’s fine, but take it outside.”

Thor stared at him like he’d only just remembered he and Tony were there.

Loki was still laughing, mad and miserable, as Thor released him and turned away, toward the windows. Loki stood with his hands on the table, leaned his head back and composed himself. (It was the same look — and the same laugh — he’d had on the quinjet when Thor had told him to shut up, Tony noted.) His nose was bleeding — a heavy drop of much-too-dark blood was beginning to crawl slowly from one nostril toward his upper lip.

He sniffed and wiped it on the back of his hand. Noticed the blood, made a _hmph_ sort of noise, and left in the direction of his room.

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Vision offered, making everyone else jump. He slipped out after Loki, and if he seemed a little too quick, a little too eager, Tony didn’t notice.

Thor sucked in a breath, then turned toward him and Rhodey.

“I apologize,” he said. “I let my temper get the better of me.” He looked thoughtful for a second and then said, “I’m going to just… go… cool off. I’ll help put this—” he waved the food “—away when I get back. Sorry.” He went outside, looking not unlike he was trying to flee the scene of a crime.

Tony and Rhodey sat in silence, digesting. (Literally and metaphorically.)

Finally, Rhodey said, “Those two are messed up.”

Tony nodded. The Asgardian stuff was so _unreal_ — space viking royalty and high adventure and _actual magic_. Some part of Tony still didn’t really one-hundred-percent believe it. The scale of it — galactic, maybe _cosmic_ — was beyond anything he could make himself understand.

At the center of it all were his friend (who Tony was beginning to suspect had a lot more baggage than he let on) and his badly, _badly_ damaged brother — loving each other and hurting each other and grieving messily. Those things Tony understood, no matter how much he pretended otherwise.

Tony said, “I can’t believe you—” he demonstrated with his hand.

“Yeah, I know,” said Rhodey, looking slightly shaken.

“Like a bike trying to stop a fight between two monster trucks.”

“Yeah, I _know_.”

 

*

 

The minutes stretched into nearly an hour, and neither of the brothers returned. Tony and Rhodey finished eating and cleaned up. They were discussing the decidedly unmanageable task of tracking down a rogue Asgardian murder-princess when Rhodey said, “Did you hear that?”

“No,” said Tony, right before hearing a distinct _thud_ from somewhere down the hall. “What—”

Loki skidded into the room in an uncharacteristically inelegant manner. He looked around frantically.

“Where is Thor?” he asked breathlessly, caught somewhere between panic and rage and trying very hard not to show it.

Tony said, “What’s going on?” as Rhodey answered, “Outside.”

The Vision floated through the wall and Loki’s gaze, which had been sweeping the floor, snapped up to look at him.

“Can you _fly_?” Loki asked, almost impressed. Tony thought that was who he’d been running from, until—

“Yes,” Vision said, sounding pleased. He pointed at Loki, and (sounding marginally _less_ pleased) said, “It’s back.”

 

*

 

When Tony found him, Thor was sitting on the railing of the grassy top-level balcony, staring at his hands. Tony was suddenly, intensely jealous of him. The balcony looked out over the pool and all Tony could think, for a split second, was that Thor — being nigh-indestructible — could totally jump off the railing into it.

It was a grey, overcast day, though. Not really a day for a swim. The moment passed. Tony cleared his throat and Thor looked over his shoulder at him.

“We’ve got a uh… problem.”

 

*

 

He was done with Loki’s shenanigans, Thor decided, as he stormed back toward the kitchen. He was going to get a hold of him, drag him back to his cell on Asgard, and come back to deal with Hela by himself. _Done._

Tony was saying something — something about magic and not understanding what exactly was happening — but Thor wasn’t really listening. Loki couldn’t stop himself from being a nuisance for five minutes, there was no possible way he was ever going to be a _help_.

Tony said something about Vision and Thor said, “What?”

“I _know_ ,” Tony said, “Just climbed him like a cat up a Christmas tree.”

Thor stopped walking. _“What?”_

“You didn’t hear a thing I said, did you?” said Tony. He shook his head. “Don’t Bruce out on me. You’re normally such a good listener.” Thor understood those words individually, but not the way they were put together. Tony walked around him and opened the door to the kitchen.

Loki’s voice spilled through the doorway, cursing indignities and promising vengeance.

Thor walked in. Stopped. Stared. Finally, he said, “Strange.”

“Yes,” said Loki, working a spell from his perch on the Vision’s shoulders. “And I’m going to stab him and this time nothing you can do will stop me.”

Vision — who, unreasonably, seemed not to mind the grievous invasion of his personal space — was floating a few inches above the floor. He was examining the brightly-glowing ring of magical fire beneath his feet with visible interest.

Thor gave a shrug. “Sorry, brother. Looks like you’re too big a danger to be allowed to roam around freely.” He considered plucking Loki off the Vision’s shoulders and throwing him into the portal himself.

“Our thoughts exactly,” said Stephen Strange, striding out of another portal that had appeared in the middle of the room. He was accompanied by another sorcerer — a sturdy, stern-faced man that Thor thought looked ready for a fight.

“Who the hell are you?” Tony objected.

Strange swept his hand up, directing the portal below the Vision to rise and swallow both of them. Loki shoved it back down to the floor with a similar gesture of his own, then broke it and the second portal apart into showers of sparks with another. He leapt down and flicked his wrists and his knives were in his hands.

Thor fought down the urge to reach for Mjolnir as he crossed the room to grab Loki’s shoulder. He tightened his grip as Loki tried to shake him off.

“Surely we can resolve this without conflict,” said the Vision calmly, dropping gently to the floor.

Loki’s snide retort was cut off by the whine of a charging repulsor. Thor looked back to see that Tony had one of the gloves of his armor on and was aiming in the general direction of the trouble.

“I’m gonna ask one more time,” Tony said, “Who the hell _are_ you and _what_ are you doing in my house?”

“Mister Stark,” Strange greeted him, with an air of deliberate condescension that made Thor want to groan. “I’m Doctor Stephen Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. Your house guest here is a threat to this planet—”

“Yeah, okay, because _that’s_ something I didn’t know,” said Tony.

“Do you have some kind of problem with me?” asked Strange, as if the tone of his voice wasn’t enough.

“Yeah, I don’t like when people try to take my stuff. So how about you run along back to Hogwarts, and we’ll call you if we need you? The Avengers can handle this.”

“Yeah,” said Strange, “Because the Avengers handled him _so_ well last time.”

“I’m _sorry_?” said Thor, feeling his grip slacken.

“I kind of feel like you should be,” said Strange.

“You know what? I changed my mind,” said Tony. He lowered his gauntlet and looked at Loki. “Kick his ass.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I've got to ask myself, "Do I keep these decisions 100% in-character, or do I set up a self-indulgent magical duel?" and let's be real, this fanfic is built on nothing if not "let's set these characters up to fight for my amusement" so here we are.


	6. Offerings for a God

“That is a _very bad plan_ ,” said Thor, as if that was something Tony didn’t know.

Loki was smiling a sharp, dangerous smile. “I disagree. I like that plan _very much_.”

“See? _He_ likes my plan,” said Tony. He looked back to Strange. “How about you? Still want to tango?”

“Tony,” he heard Rhodey caution.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Tony said, without taking his eyes off of Strange. He walked forward, sliding past the Vision to stand next to Loki. “See, Prince Joffrey over here—” he patted Loki on the arm (oh god what was he doing) “—has got a _lot_ of pent-up anger, and I’d really rather he didn’t take it out on me. So if you’re gonna break into my house and talk shit and pick fights, I’m more than happy to let him wipe the floor with you—” he looked at Loki, “I mean, I assume you can. Wipe the floor with him, I mean?”

_“Absolutely.”_

“You like a challenge, right?” Tony turned toward him and said, more quietly, “You want to prove you’re not a mad dog? Don’t break my stuff and don’t kill anyone.”

Loki watched him, eyes narrowed. Then he flicked his wrists again and the knives were gone. “You have my word I won’t bloody your floor,” he acquiesced. “After all, if I kill them, they can’t _learn_.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Strange shook his head. “This is your idea of handling the situation?”

“Or you could leave. Or, god forbid, actually _help_. I don’t suppose you considered asking what’s going on?”

“I think we’re past talking.” Strange waved his hands and Tony felt a _shift_. He grabbed the nearest stable object — which, unfortunately, happened to be Loki — and then everything went… weird. The air sparkled, the world cracked, faceted like a jewel.

“Oh dear,” said the Vision. His voice was muffled. He was on the other side of the weirdness, which Tony thought must be some kind of wall.

“Tony?!” Rhodey was on the other side of it, too. “Where did they go?”

“A dimensional shift,” Loki said, “To a temporary mirror space. An… _interesting_ choice,” he tilted his head at Strange. “Can you even get yourself out of here?”

“Yep,” said Strange. He raised his hands and moved one of them in a circle. “Bye.”

Nothing happened. Loki sat back on his heels, put his hands behind his back, and smiled.

“Please tell me you don’t need the use of those cute little portals to get out of here,” he said. “You got the better of me with them once, you didn’t really think I’d let you use them again once I got you here, did you?”

Strange looked at the other sorcerer, who already looked like he was casting a spell. “Wong?”

“It’s some kind of ward. I can’t — he’s putting it back together faster than I can break it.”

“He can’t do that and cast other spells at the same time, right?”

Wong looked at Loki, who just raised his eyebrows and smiled. Thor made a noise that sounded like he was trying not to laugh.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Wong.

“Well,” said Thor, “Now we’re stuck.” He let go of Loki and stepped back, then looked at Tony. “I hope you know what you’re doing, because none of us are getting out of here until Loki decides otherwise.”

“Or someone could knock him out,” said Wong.

“I’m tempted.”

Loki stalked toward the sorcerers. Strange conjured up some kind of energy, like a rope stretched between his hands. Wong made a gesture and the space expanded, putting distance between them and Loki. Pieces of the world twisted and duplicated and rearranged themselves.

“Hey—” said Tony, “Put my house back together.”

Loki plucked at the faceted air. “This space isn’t real. It’s a reflection of the dimension we live in. Alterations made here aren’t permanent, and nothing done here will affect the real world.”

“The mirror dimension,” Strange explained. “We use it to contain threats.”

“Just out of curiosity,” Tony said to Loki, “Can _you_ get us out of here?” He was starting to feel a bit apprehensive. He’d set this up; it was on him if it went wrong.

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” Loki said. He was still advancing on Strange, slowly, “There are always cracks in things like this… all I have to do is find an edge and I can pull it apart, like peeling an orange.”

“Keep working on that ward,” Strange said to Wong. He started toward Loki, brandishing the energy between his hands. He snapped his hand forward and it lashed out like a whip.

He’d probably meant it to intimidate rather than connect, but Loki reached out and snagged it. He wound it around his fist, then pulled it hand over hand, dragging Strange toward him. Caught off-guard, Strange pulled back, but his human strength against Loki’s Asgardian was _hilariously_ futile. Loki yanked it, then flicked it out toward Strange, wrapping it around his wrists. He threw his end to the ground, and it became a gold chain, connecting Strange to the floor.

“Do not sheathe your sharpest sword against me, mortal. Even together, I have you outnumbered.”

Strange pulled at it to no avail, but he managed some spell to dissipate the chain and stumbled back. Loki didn’t make another move against him, just put his hands behind his back again and waited for the fight to begin in earnest.

“‘Mortal,’” huffed Strange. “That’s right. You Asgardians think of yourselves as _gods_. Sorry to break it to you, buddy, but I’m an atheist.” He conjured new weapons — burning mandalas that sparked in his hands. He lowered himself into a fighting stance. Tony had to give him points for style, at least, but beside him, Thor just shook his head.

“Never too late to convert,” said Loki. His knives were back in his hands when he pulled them out from behind his back. He flipped them into an overhand grip and golden light washed over him. When it was gone, he was back in the Asgardian clothes he’d been in the previous day. Admittedly, he cut a much more impressive figure in that than his borrowed t-shirt and jeans.

Strange charged, lashing out with his blades — were they blades? Loki blocked them like they were, but he didn’t seem to have much trouble. Wong had stopped whatever spell he was casting and had summoned up his own weapons. He started toward them.

Strange scoffed and said, “What are you supposed to be the god of, anyway? Mischief? Tricks? Lies? Who worships _that?_ What are you gonna do, beat me with a prank?”

“How about a pun?” said Loki, “I have a few favorites.”

Wong charged in and the fight changed drastically. Up until now, Loki had been leading Strange around, batting back his strikes like they were playing patty-cake. Wong was different — Wong knew what he was doing. Sharpest sword, indeed.

Still, though — Loki danced around them and between them, getting them tangled up in each other. At one point he split into three Lokis that attacked independently until Wong hit one and it disappeared. Strange tried the whip again and wrapped it around one Loki’s ankle, but it was the real Loki, and he pulled Strange off his feet to trip up Wong.

All of them fell back, casting various spells. Wong swept his hands and the world kaleidoscoped again, parts of the floor unlocking and turning in various directions. Not just the floor, Tony realized — _everything_. Tony started to slide as the whole room turned sideways and he grabbed onto Thor, who just stood with his arms crossed looking unperturbed.

“I’ll make you a deal,” said Loki, stepping delicately over pieces of the shifting floor as his remaining double stumbled and vanished. “I won’t remove my ward against your portals, but when we’re done here and you’ve yielded the fight, I’ll make you a door.”

They were upside-down now. Loki was still casting his spell but whatever Strange was doing was interrupted as he fell, ass over elbows and swearing loudly, out of the room and into the sky.

Wong jumped easily over pieces of the floating debris toward Loki and sliced in at him with his mandalas. Loki fell back over the side of the flooring he was standing on and stepped onto the other side of it, upside-down. He pulled a staff from nowhere and made his way from surface to surface as Wong followed him, increasingly unstable. Loki jabbed over at whatever Wong was standing on and flipped it over. Wong somehow managed to keep his balance and they went back to trading blows.

Strange floated up out of the floor — or was it down out of the ceiling? This was either the best or worst ride Tony had ever been on — and grabbed one end of Loki’s staff as he swung it up to block one of Wong’s strikes. Loki staggered back as Strange pulled him, then ran up and around the swirling world-fragments until he was right-side-up again and swung the staff, flinging Strange into a wall.

“Can _you_ fly, too?” asked Loki. “I’m starting to think that’s a spell I should practice.”

“It comes in handy,” Strange grunted.

Loki flipped his staff around and cracked the end of it against the bit he was standing on and the room abruptly righted itself, pieces falling into place across the floor, arranging themselves into that intricate Celtic knotwork Asgard seemed to love.

“It’s like trying to fight Mordo,” said Strange, staggering to his feet.

“It’s like trying to fight _her_ ,” said Wong, brushing himself off and re-summoning his weapons.

“So, magic—” said Loki ponderously, “What is magic, exactly?”

“It’s the use of dimensional energies to—” started Strange.

Loki waved his hand, “—to alter reality blah blah, yes, but what _is_ it?”

Thor’s hand was over his mouth — Tony could see him smothering a smile. At Tony’s look, he said, “This is almost over.”

Loki advanced toward the sorcerers once more and they came to meet him, but they were tiring — Loki was not. “We wave our hands and speak the words and we tell a story so perfect — a lie so exquisite — that the world itself believes for a time that a man can be in two places at once, or fly, or wield fire like a blade.”

He swept Strange’s legs out from under him again, kicked Wong in the chest and sent him stumbling back. He put the end of his staff to the latter’s chin and said, “Yield.” Wong put his hands up, his weapons dispersed.

Strange got back to his feet and charged at Loki.

“So who worships a god of tricks and lies? The answer, of course, is tricksters and liars — and among those, magicians. Like yourself.”

Strange tried a few more reckless, desperate blows, and his cloak — which had a mind of its own, it seemed — tried to help by grabbing Loki’s staff and pulling it away from him. Loki twisted the staff around the fabric, pulled it from Strange’s shoulders, and shoved the end of it into a crack in the floor. The cloak struggled to free itself but was wedged in too tightly.

Loki made a series of grand, complicated gestures and Strange dashed toward him to take advantage of his distraction. The world warped again, shifting to fall back into its natural order, and Strange ran straight into a glimmering, glass-like wall.

“What the hell, where did you guys go?!” Rhodey yelled. He and Vision had jumped up from where they were sitting at the table, presumably discussing what they should do about their friends’ disappearance.

Loki walked in a circle around the glass-like bubble he’d wrapped around Strange. Or — no, it was that “mirror dimension,” but he’d pulled part of it out into the real world with Strange still trapped inside it.

“I thought you said you were going to make me a door,” said Strange caustically, muffled.

Loki gestured to the bubble with a confused look on his face. “I did!”

“This,” said Strange, slapping his hands against the side of it, “Is _not a door_.”

“Exactly!” Loki looked very pleased with himself. He said to Strange, “And when is a door not a door?” He tapped on the “glass.”

Thor groaned.

Strange just stared at Loki.

“I promised you a pun, didn’t I?” said Loki. “You walked right into it.”

Wong burst into laughter.

“I take all the usual offerings. Food, drink, supplication. Grand stories, stolen gold, and unspun wool are all favorites, as well.” He waved his hand, making the bubble disappear and Strange spilled out of it onto the floor. Loki leaned over him as his cloak slithered back to him. “You’re very talented. How long have you been at this?”

Strange stood and brushed himself off and glared at him. “Two years.”

Loki shook his head. “You mortals do work fast,” he said. “I’ll make you another deal: if we’re both still alive in ninety-eight years, I’ll come and find you, and we can test your century of study in the magical arts against my ten.”

“Wha— sorry, did you— ten… ten _centuries?_ ” stammered Strange. Loki clapped him on the shoulder.

Rhodey said, “When _is_ a door not a door?”

Tony said, “When it’s a _jar_.” Rhodey groaned.

“And he _walked right into it_ ,” said Wong, wheezing.

 

*

 

“Not bad, Goblin King,” said Tony. He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped at the screen. “Gotta go make a call, back in five.” He paused and looked at Strange, “Should I call you guys a cab, by the way?”

Loki walked back to Thor’s side and settled next to him, watching as Strange went to find a chair to sit down in.

“There, see,” he said. “No harm done.”

Thor heaved a sigh and shook his head. “I had forgotten what a joy it is to watch you fight when I’m not on the receiving end of it, brother,” he admitted.

Loki preened.

“But this does not mean I trust you.”

“I expect no such thing,” said Loki. “But I thought it might put a smile on your face.”

 _“A jar,”_ Thor said. “I hate that joke.” But he _was_ smiling.

 

*

 

Once upon a time, Galina Knock had been a nobody on SHIELD’s watch list. Just an antiques dealer that had bought artifacts illicitly from the Ten Rings and occasionally shot people who got wise about it. Tech wasn’t _exactly_ her specialty, but she knew people, and when Clint Barton called her up and promised her a fat stack of cash in exchange for a short list of things he needed for a client, she hadn’t bothered to ask why.

Knock thought of herself as a girl who worked smart. Get paid up front, don’t piss anybody off, don’t make yourself invaluable _or_ a liability, and don’t ever, _ever_ deal with real power.

Once upon a time, Galina Knock had had _no idea_ what real power was.

She hadn’t expected this little vacation to Tønsberg would put her in the path of more Asgardian royalty, but when Hela had walked into their camp that night and declared that her ragtag band of former-ish-HYDRA looked like they needed a goddess to worship, Knock wasn’t about to argue.

Especially since anyone who argued got brutally murdered.

Their goddess was sitting in a folding chair on a hill, overlooking her servants’ work now. She’d been furnished with a six-pack of beer, a pizza, and a pair of sunglasses.

A feast — meager as it was — was the due of any goddess who deigned to walk among mortals, Hela had said. The sunglasses just looked cool.

HYDRA had brought a few machines to help, but their work promised to be difficult even if it was possible at all. Hela changed that. Dredging the dead einherjar out of the inlet was made much easier by their willingness to get up and walk out of the water themselves. Knock’s agents, meanwhile, busied themselves with stripping the Asgardian skeletons of their golden armor.

Knock herself was sitting by the goddess’s side, pulling up schematics on her laptop. She’d paid an arm and a leg (though naturally, not her own) to a member of the Ten Rings to smuggle them to her.

“You won’t be able to forge the metal with your mortal technology,” Hela was telling her, looking over the designs. “And there are some improvements that could be made — particularly here, in the joints.” She indicated.

“Of course, my goddess,” said Knock. Hela grinned. She knew when her ego was being stroked. But that, also, was her due. “When it’s done—” because such problems were surely nothing Hela couldn’t solve “—we’ll need one of _these_ as well, to act as a power source.” Knock moved to another screen, to show her. “Stealing it will prove difficult, but it’ll almost certainly bring you into conflict with your brother — or at least his friends.”

Hela chuckled darkly at that. “Those self-righteous little whelps,” she said. “They think they fooled me. Why should I bother searching for them when I can make them come to me?” She raised her eyes to the sea — to the dark _thing_ that lurked beneath the surface of it — and drained her beer.

Knock tried hard to swallow her growing sense of dread. She’d only caught sight of that thing once, and it made her nervous. “What exactly were you planning on doing with _that_ , my goddess?”

“Conquering,” said Hela, “Obviously.”

“There’s much to conquer,” said Knock.

“It doesn’t matter where,” Hela said, “Just as long as it’s big and well-populated. And coastal. Surely Midgard’s _heroes_ will not stand idly by and watch as their precious realm is razed.” She pulled another beer from the case and pulled the cap off of it with her fingers. “And while they’re busy — or when they’re dead — I can go home and take command there. And you, _faithful servant_ —” she said these words with a knowing smirk “—can keep what we’ve conquered here, along with this — what was that name you called it by? I quite liked it.” She waved her hand at the schematics on Knock’s screen.

“My goddess,” said Knock, “It is called _War Machine_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was completely unprepared for how many people wanted a "rematch" between Loki and Strange. I hope I did it justice.
> 
> If I feel like I kind of want to chop this fic into multiple parts, is that a turn-off? We've reached roughly the middle of what I've been thinking of as "part one" and I'm starting to think about the rest of the fic in terms of structure. I'm inexperienced at the finer workings of AO3 and (more importantly) how people prefer to go about reading fics on here. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. <3


	7. Answers for Answers

_Conversation: 8:54pm yesterday_

_Rhodey sent a picture_ ****  
**Rhodey:** Avengers Help -- Aliens Invading New York Again  
**Rhodey:** They have invaded the couch.

 **Maria Hill:** lol

 **Rhodey:** Thor ate all the general tso chicken I didn't get any. :(

 **Maria Hill:** lol say hi to thor for me  
**Maria Hill:** wait  
**Maria Hill:** jim is that loki  
**Maria Hill:** jim what the @#$%  
**Maria Hill:** answer me is that loki it looks like loki  
**Maria Hill:** does tony know loki is in his house  
**Maria Hill:** i'm calling him  
**Maria Hill:** you can't just send me a pic of loki in your house and then go dark wtf

 **Rhodey:** How many texts did you send in the four seconds since I put down my phone???

 **Maria Hill:** it's not loki right

_You sent a picture._  
**You:** It's definitely Loki. :/  
**You:** The Mighty Thor has vanquished him For Now.

 **Maria Hill:** wtf is going on over there

 **You:** @#$% if I know. There's a sister now and she's Worse I guess.

 **Maria Hill:** worse than LOKI?

 **You:** It's a long story. I'll call you. We'll do lunch. Later babe.

 **Maria Hill:** tony don't make me shoot you

_2:12 pm today_

**You:** Maria, is Phil Coulson alive?

 **Maria Hill:** let me call you

 

 

Tony pressed the end call button on his phone and thought that it was a travesty that modern touch screen phones couldn’t be slammed. Well, he could throw it, he supposed. Screw it. He threw the phone and it landed somewhere in the grass and bounced. It was probably okay. Maybe.

The worst part about it, Tony decided, was that he couldn’t even really be _mad_. It wasn’t like he and Phil Coulson had ever been friends — they hadn’t even been co-workers — hell, they hadn’t even _liked_ each other. And Fury was a spy. Everything SHIELD did under his command was on a need-to-know basis, and Tony just hadn’t needed to know.

Pepper had liked him. It wasn’t fair to _her_. That was the best Tony had to justify his sense of betrayal.

The rest of what he was angry about had nothing to do with Fury. Or, at least, wasn’t Fury’s _fault._ (Except, perhaps, in Tony’s most paranoid fantasies.)

“How long have you been standing there?” Tony asked, even though he knew.

Thor chuckled. “Long enough to see that that mortal device of yours must have done you a terrible grievance.” _Mortal device._ Thor knew what a phone was. He hadn’t talked like that in a long time, except when he was playing stupid. Tony wondered how often Thor had played stupid before Tony had learned to recognize it. He started picking through the grass for his phone and Thor walked over to join him.

“Just got off the phone with Hill,” Tony said.

“Coulson?”

“Alive and kicking.” Tony spotted the phone and picked it up. The screen was cracked. “Hey FRIDAY?”

“Yeah, boss?”

“Order me a new phone.”

“No problem, boss.”

He went to put it back in his pocket and caught sight of Thor out of the corner of his eye. “Actually — make it two.”

“I don’t like that we were lied to,” said Thor, “But I’m glad to hear he’s well.”

“Yeah, that’s probably the thing to focus on,” said Tony. Thor nodded. He turned to leave. “Hey—”

Thor turned to look at him. When Tony hesitated, he said, “Everything all right?”

“Is it?” said Tony, “With you, I mean.”

Thor looked uncertain. Finally, he said, “I’ll be fine.”

He would, Tony thought. He was one of those people that would always be fine, eventually. Resilient. Rhodey was like that — so was Steve. They just kept moving, somehow, and eventually they got away from it. Tony envied them. The stuff that happened to him, no matter what he did, he just seemed to bring it with him. He nodded, and this time when Thor turned back to the door, Tony didn’t stop him.

 

*

 

“A dimensional breach in Norway would have been the London sanctum’s responsibility,” said Wong. “We can contact them to see if they’ve had any problems. Even if they had, we probably wouldn’t have heard about it here.”

“It would probably be helpful if we had _a little more information about what we’re looking for_ ,” said Rhodey meaningfully in Loki’s general direction.

The Asgardian was telling Strange a story about a time he’d participated some kind of elaborate magical heist on an alien planet. Strange alternated between demanding that Loki tell him how he’d done a spell and declaring that whatever Loki had just said was impossible. The Vision occasionally interrupted for clarifications on terminology. Loki, for his part, seemed deeply amused.

“You’re full of shit,” said Strange. His grip on his cup of tea had gotten very tight. If he kept that up, he was going to break it again.

“I’m a _god_ ,” said Loki flippantly. He was sipping wine from a delicate glass. Rhodey had no idea where he’d gotten it or how it never seemed to be empty, but he assumed the answer was magic, since that seemed to be the theme of the day.

“Of _lies_ ,” said Strange. “You couldn’t _fully heal four severely injured people_ in the middle of a fight. If you used that much magic, you’d be vomiting squirrels or something.”

“Sorry, how— how does _that_ work?” said Rhodey.

“It’s pretty simple,” said Wong. “Magic is physically demanding. A person’s body can only handle so much of it at once.”

“A _human_ body,” Loki corrected him.

Wong just shrugged, and Strange gave him a disgusted look. “Oh, come on.”

“I’m not going to argue with him,” said Wong.

“You can’t tell me you actually _believe_ any of this _god_ stuff,” said Strange.

“I didn’t say I believed it, I said I’m not going to argue with him.”

“A wise decision, where my brother is involved,” said Thor from the door. He walked over to lean on the back of Loki’s chair. Tony walked in after him, wearing that face he wore when he was trying to look like something wasn’t bothering him.

“We’re getting sidetracked,” said Rhodey, too late, because now Loki and Wong had begun discussing the benefits and drawbacks of Loki’s Asgardian magic compared to whatever Strange had learned on Earth.

“Not Asgardian, technically,” Loki was saying. “Seidr is the magic of my mother’s people, from Vanaheim, which she taught to—”

Thor plucked the wine glass out of his hand. “I can’t believe we’ve been on Midgard for a day and a half and you’re already drunk and dueling people. It’s like traveling with Fandral.”

“First: I am not drunk, I am _drinking_. Second: it is _nothing_ like traveling with Fandral, I haven’t even hit on anyone yet.” He gestured to the wine glass and snapped his fingers.

Thor gave him a withering look and, without breaking eye contact, downed the entire glass in a single long draw. Thor handed it back to him. It didn’t refill.

“Spoilsport.” Loki made the glass disappear.

“Fandral sounds fun,” said Tony. Loki opened his mouth to say something and Thor put his hand over it.

“It’s all I can think of, other than trying to scry for her,” said Wong to Rhodey.

Strange said at Thor, “We’ll need another strand of hair for that.” Thor’s glare was interrupted as he jerked his hand back from Loki’s face and wiped it on his jacket.

“You’re the worst,” he said to Loki, and snapped his fingers at him, mimicking his brother’s earlier gesture.

“Second-worst,” Loki corrected him, and handed him a knife.

Thor reached over his shoulder and pulled a braided lock of hair forward. He cut it off in a single motion of the knife and handed it to Strange. “Hunt her down,” he said.

“Happily,” said Strange, unhappily, and put the braid in a pocket somewhere. He sighed. “If we’re leaving, can we have the use of our portals back?” He looked at Loki.

“No,” said Loki. Thor shoved the back of his shoulder. _“Fine,”_ he whined. “But if they try to capture me again, I’m going to actually stab them and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.”

He gave a wave of his hand and Strange said, “Thank you.” Strange and Wong stood, and Strange made a sparking, fire-ringed hole that looked into a room with a large staircase. Wong stepped down into it, but Strange stopped and said to Loki, “You’re welcome to come. It’s not every day we have an opportunity to study alien magic.”

“I don’t think I’m allowed out without a babysitter,” said Loki.

“I’ll go,” said Vision, unsurprisingly.

Loki looked at Thor, who said, “Certainly you’re not seeking _my_ permission.”

“Just heading off any argument,” Loki said. Satisfied, he looked at Tony instead.

Tony shrugged. “Go, get out of my hair.”

 _“Behave,”_ Thor growled after him.

Loki rose from his chair, looking scandalized. “ _Me?_ Not behave? Brother, you wound m—” he walked backwards through Strange’s portal, but the floor on the other side was lower than on this one and he tripped backwards with a swear and a thud.

“God, that is satisfying,” said Strange, ushering the Vision through and then stepping in himself.

The portal dwindled and fizzled out.

“Is Vision acting weird?” said Tony.

“He’s really into the magic stuff,” Rhodey said. “Think it’s because of Wanda?”

Vision occasionally disappeared for days or weeks; it was a truth universally unacknowledged that he still saw her.

“He wants to understand that stone that came out of Loki’s staff, too,” said Tony.

“If he can get Loki to tell him something about it, that’ll be more than anyone on Asgard ever got out of him,” said Thor.

 

*

 

Stephen Strange fingered through the tomes on a bookshelf, trying to remember the one he needed. “I thought Wong was telling you two about the relics,” he said, as Loki leaned in to look over the spines of the books.

“He is,” Loki said casually. Strange leaned around the shelf to look and saw Loki and the Vision listening dutifully as Wong explained the origins of a sword in one of the glass cases.

Strange opened his mouth to deny the possibility of Loki being in two places at once, but shut it again. _Just another keyhole, Stephen,_ he thought to himself. Instead he said, “Can you actually be in two places at once, or is that one an illusion?”

Loki smiled sidelong at him with that same “see, you’re _learning_ ” smile he’d frequently gotten from the Ancient One. (Though from Loki, the expression was only patronizing and not proud.) He clucked his tongue, and said, “That’s not typically a trick I like to divulge on a first date.” He tapped one of the shelves. “One of these, I think.”

Strange looked at the books he was indicating. He was right. Of _course_ he was. Strange pulled the one he needed from the shelf.

“However,” Loki said, “Perhaps I’ll tell you anyway if you’ll indulge a question of my own.”

“What’s that?” Strange asked.

“Why did you not send my father back to Asgard?”

“You and your brother aren’t real big on communication, are you?” said Strange. He set the book down on a table and started to flip through it.

“That is an understatement of truly epic proportion.”

Strange chuckled. “I offered. The spell would have been difficult, but surely not beyond the skill of the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj. He refused.”

Strange relished the look of confusion on Loki’s face.

“He wanted to be left alone, but it made me a little nervous to have an Asgardian wandering homeless around the streets of New York practicing petty magic. Finally he told me there was some place in Norway he wanted to see again. I suspect he just wanted me to quit bothering him.”

Loki paced, fidgeting with his hands. “Did he not fear for the safety of Asgard?”

Strange shrugged. “If he did, he didn’t say anything to me. Just said he’d decided to stay in exile—”

“He’d _decided_ to stay in exile? You’re certain?”

“That’s what he said,” said Strange. Loki continued to fidget, sinking deeper into whatever pit of internal turmoil Strange had inadvertently pushed him toward.

Odin was dead now, Strange knew. The greasy, uncomfortable feeling of having _lost a patient_ crept over him. (It wasn’t _guilt_ , Strange told himself. You did what you could with what you had and there was no shame in that. But he hated that it wasn’t _enough_.)

“I’m sorry,” he said, and hoped the words didn’t sound as stiff as he felt.

“Don’t be absurd,” Loki said. “There’s nothing you could have done.” People always meant that to be some kind of absolution. _Nothing you could have done._ Strange _knew_ there was nothing he could have done. That was the part he hated.

“No, I mean,” Strange said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Oh,” said Loki. He didn’t seem to know what to do with that. “Thank you.”

It was probably a bad idea to touch dangerous people who unequivocally wanted to stab you, but Strange patted Loki on the shoulder anyway. Then he went back to flipping through the book so he wouldn’t have to look at Loki’s grief. He hadn’t pegged Loki as a _crier_. He wanted to find it funny and couldn’t.

“So,” said Loki, clearing his throat, “The answer to your question is that it’s a bit of both. I can project my senses elsewhere — be in two places at once, as you said — but such a projection has no physical body. Therefore, to be seen and heard—”

“—an illusion,” Strange said, nodding. “I get how astral projection works, anybody can do that.” That was not strictly true, but now wasn’t the moment to toot his own horn. “But you’re talking about splitting your consciousness between your physical body and your astral body and that’s…”

“Impossible?” Loki said, raising his eyebrows.

“…not something I’ve ever heard of before.” Strange had questions. So many questions. What did it feel like? Was he perceiving everything simultaneously or was it a true separation? Was it something a human could learn, or was it particular to Asgardians? Was it difficult?

 _Teach me,_ Strange fell short of saying. He had a feeling that making such a request of a guy who believed himself to be a god would demand much more surrender of his pride than Kamar-Taj had. Loki was not the Ancient One, to teach for the love of it and for the sake of the Earth’s safety. Though, standing as he was, with his hands clasped behind his back and that clever, self-satisfied look on his face, Strange was reminded of her fiercely. (And so what, if the thought brought a little heartache?)

“You are forgetting your work,” Loki said, nodding to the book.

“Right.”

When Wong came around the corner of the bookshelf and saw Loki already standing there, he didn’t even look surprised.

 

*

 

The scrying failed, repeatedly. The London sanctum had had no problems; more disconcertingly, they hadn’t detected Hela’s appearance at all. With no news, the Avengers returned to some semblance of a routine.

As the days passed, Thor became increasingly domestic, which nobody minded, because unlike everyone else living there, the guy could _cook_. As for Loki… the greasy weasel look was apparently intentional, because without access to whatever he used to slick his hair back, he grew progressively fluffier.

Tony got Thor a phone. He managed to use it exactly once, to call Jane and tell her he was well. (It turned out she was working somewhere just outside of New York at the moment and they made nebulous maybe-plans to get coffee and catch up at some point.) After that, Thor gave it to Loki, who was allowed to wander unsupervised back and forth from the Avengers facility to Strange’s Sanctum so long as he kept it on him.

Tony wondered how he was getting there until Thor cooked breakfast one day, and Tony got up early enough to witness Loki scarf down at least two people’s worth of food, turn into a bird, and fly off.

“Where does he keep the phone when he does that?” Tony had asked.

“Forget the phone,” said Rhodey, “Where does the _food_ go?”

It broke the laws of both physics and common sense, and they agreed to never speak of it again.

Both Thor and Loki tried to call for the Bifrost again, to no avail. They were all starting to worry that Hela had somehow found a way off the planet herself when one night, as they were sitting in the rec room talking about it, one of the warehouses at the other end of the facility exploded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late post. I got sick over the weekend.
> 
> If there's no chapter on Thursday, I'm still sick. Boo.


	8. Such Fragile Things

By the time Tony got there, there was nothing left of the warehouse but fire.

“FRIDAY, talk to me. What’s going on?”

“No report from security. Camera footage looks like a lightning strike, boss.”

“Lightning strike?” Tony looked up at the sky. Black clouds, but no rain. He knew what that meant.

“Thor, I think we found your—” Something heavy (and familiar) thunked into the side of Tony’s armor and he went crashing into the dirt. “—hammer.” Mjolnir was lying on the ground beside him. “’Sup, buddy?”

_“We’re on our way,”_ Tony heard Thor say, _“Be careful, Tony. She’s dangerous.”_

The hammer hummed, pulled itself free from the ground, and flew off. Tony followed its flight to where it was caught by a tall, svelte woman dressed in black.

Tony got up. “Well, if it isn’t Xena, Warrior Princess. To what do I owe the honor?”

She looked him over. “First,” she said, “I am no longer a princess, I am a queen. Second, it’s _Hela_.” She swung the hammer again, faster than Thor. Tony ducked it, but faster still was the bolt of lightning. He watched the suit’s power level climb.

“You know, your brother did that when I first met him, too,” he said, and blasted her back into the wreckage of the warehouse.

There was no way this was legit, Tony thought. This stank of Stuttgart — he was being played.

She strode out of the debris, shaking away the flames, as he took off again. Behind the warehouse, a black van was retreating down the street. That’s where the real party was. “I think she brought friends. I’m going after them,” Tony said. “Enjoy the family reunion,” he told Hela, and flew off after it.

Or tried to.

He hadn’t gotten far before he was jerked back. She’d wrapped some kind of weapon around his leg, like a grappling hook, and she pulled on it, dragging him back to her.

This was the first moment that Tony asked himself: Why had he come alone? Why hadn’t he waited?

He pushed the suit to its limit, but still she held him. How had he not just picked her up and flown off with her? He looked down to see that she’d dropped Mjolnir to the ground and wrapped the other end of her weapon around its handle.

She jerked him to the ground with bruising strength, then dragged him to her by his ankle.

“Look,” Tony said, as she flipped him over like the Iron Man suit weighed nothing and dropped Mjolnir onto his stomach, “Normally I wouldn’t argue about looking up at a beautiful woman from this angle, but I’m kind of in a relationship right now.” He aimed a repulsor at her and fired.

She didn’t even move out of the way. It just hit her in the face and she flinched and shook it off.

This was stupid, Tony thought, as she moved his hand out of the way and put her boot on his faceplate. The grass sunk beneath his head before the metal itself started to give. The glass of the display started to crack. This was _stupid_. When they’d told him about her, he’d expected a level of power along the lines of Thor or Loki, which was bad enough.

“Guys, I’m… I’m gonna need a little help,” said Tony.

Why hadn’t he waited?

“You’re flesh and blood beneath all that metal, aren’t you, war machine?” she purred. Tony’s heart pounded. _War machine?_ She had stopped short of smashing his helmet and now she leaned over him. She opened her hand and a blade appeared in it — a short blade, like a hunting knife. With a smile, she shoved it into his chest, and the sensors on the suit started going berserk.

_“Tony?”_ it was Rhodey, _“Tony, are you okay? What’s going—”_ his voice cut out as Hela severed the wires that connected the arc reactor to the rest of the suit.

Tony couldn’t breathe. He was panicking — a soft little creature in a tin can, Hela dragging that can opener through his chest. He could feel the sharp point of it in his flesh, the sudden hot dampness of blood. Through the adrenaline, he couldn’t tell how deep the wound was.

“Will they come for you, those artless little curs my father spawned? I hear they have a great love for this pathetic realm.”

She looked like Loki. The color scheme helped, but also that same dark hair and those same glass-green eyes. But that was the end of the resemblance. The madness in her eyes was a very different thing, and _god_ , that slasher smile of hers was Thor’s — his battle-lust cranked up to eleven and twisted ’til it splintered.

_So, she’s you but worse?_ he’d asked. She wasn’t just _Loki, but worse_. If New York was a playground, Loki was a schoolyard bully and Hela was Jack the Ripper.

The metal of his suit screeched in protest as she sliced into it. “I’m going to tear out your heart, mortal,” she said gleefully.

A repulsor blast hit her in the face. _“Get — off — my — friend!”_ Rhodey shouted, punctuating each word with a blow. She picked up the War Machine armor like it weighed nothing and threw it. A pair of knives, flickering with green-gold magic, buried themselves in her chest one after the other, and then Thor (armed with one of Natasha’s stun batons) threw himself into battle with her. Hela called Mjolnir to her hand and rose to meet him.

“See if you can catch up with Hela’s allies,” Tony heard Loki say, low and calm in the midst of this absolute chaos.

“Take care of him,” said Rhodey. Tony heard rather than saw him fly off.

Loki grabbed the Iron Man suit by the shoulder and dragged Tony away from the fight, then knelt over him. Tony laughed shakily, giddy with the relief that bubbled up inside him. He was happy to see _Loki_. That’s how bad it was.

“Having fun in there, Stark?” Loki said with a chuckle.

“Havin’ a ball,” Tony said.

“How do I get you out of this?” Loki asked.

“Well, normally you’d have to ask me out first,” said Tony. He reached up to eject the faceplate, unpowered limbs moving sluggishly. Loki watched as carefully as he could, eyes flicking up to watch Thor and Hela every so often.

“We’ve been living together for almost a week,” Loki said, his deft hands searching the body of the armor for similar mechanisms, “I feel like we’re getting things a bit out of order.”

“Tell you what,” said Tony, “If we live, I’ll buy you dinner.”

Loki pried off the chestplate. “I’m pretty sure you still owe me a drink.”

“Hell of a bedside manner you’ve got here, doc.”

“Isn’t ‘playing doctor’ a euphemism? Watch the fight,” Loki told him, and apparently trusted him to do just that, because he stopped looking up at it himself. Thor was undeniably taking a beating, but he stubbornly remained between them and Hela, and so far he didn’t seem too badly injured.

Loki said, “I’m going to stop the bleeding. It may sting.” Tony felt Loki’s hand on the center of his chest and a warm, tingly feeling spread out from it, burning painfully where it met the gashes in his chest.

Tony hissed. “Gettin’ handsy already.” Hela had struck Thor’s weapon with Mjolnir hard enough to break it and now she raised her hands and the darkness surrounding her writhed like a living thing. Tony said, “I think—” and Loki glanced up to see what was happening, and then dove to cover Tony as the blackness burst into a shower of shrapnel. Tony brought his still-armored arm up over Loki’s head and two pieces of twisted black metal were driven into it, one of them deep enough to sink into his wrist. Loki grunted at the impact, then pulled all (or at least most) of the darts from himself with a wave of his hand.

“Can you move?” Loki asked.

Tony tried. The wound in his chest hurt, but it didn’t stop him from moving. “Yeah,” he said.

“Then _move_ ,” said Loki, standing. He moved his hands in the motions of a spell and flung a pair of swords into the ground on either side of him. He called his brother’s attention to them, then, without waiting to be sure Thor had heard him, summoned up his knives and plunged himself into the fray.

When Loki gave him the chance to disengage, Thor turned and took the swords, and then they were both on her. It was not unlike watching Loki fight Strange and Wong — except that all of them knew what they were doing, they were legitimately trying to kill each other, and it was not at all fun.

Tony pried the rest of the suit off, except for his unbroken gauntlet. The repulsors in the gloves had their own power sources, so he had something to defend himself with, at least. He tried to keep the brothers between Hela and himself, and took pot shots at her whenever the opportunity presented itself. He couldn’t do any real damage, but he could be an occasional distraction.

“I’ll admit,” said Hela, “You’re much more challenging to fight when you haven’t already beaten each other half to death. Though… I feel like you were in better spirits when the one of you had just tried to kill the other. Funny.” She did seem to think it was funny. Tony, however, felt his blood run cold.

A beam of yellow light sliced an arc between Hela and her brothers.

“Ohh,” she said, looking up at the Vision, “Now _that’s_ not bad.” She flung her sword at him but he phased through it.

Hela spun Mjolnir and conjured another sword. The stone in Vision’s forehead gleamed as he started to fire another beam, but he hesitated when Thor lunged at her, giving her time to hit him with a bolt of lightning that dropped him out of the sky.

She threw Mjolnir between Thor and Loki, aiming for Tony, and he just barely threw himself out of the way. She slid between the brothers’ blades, calling the hammer back to her and bending to make it bolt over the ground, swiping one of Thor’s legs out from under him as it returned to her. She swung her sword at Loki and powered through his two-handed block, ripping down through his collar and across his chest. Without stopping, she brought the sword up and around Thor’s weapons and, seemingly unhindered as he buried one of them in her stomach, stabbed him in the chest — right up through his ribs and out his back.

Thor roared with pain. Vision was getting up, shaking himself. Tony could see Rhodey returning — not fast enough to help. Loki, who had somehow remained on his feet, tried one last strike at her while she was turned away from him, and she slapped the remaining knife out of his hand, picked him up by his throat, and flung him into the burning warehouse.

She was laughing. _Laughing._ She pulled the sword from her torso like it was a mild annoyance, and she was laughing.

“Don’t die yet, little brother,” she said, leaning over Thor, who was curled around the sword in his chest, growling in wordless agony. “I have such plans for your precious Midgard. I wouldn’t want you to miss it.” She walked over to the discarded husk of Tony’s armor and picked up the chestplate, then flung herself into the sky. Tony fell to his knees beside Thor and put his hand on Thor’s shoulder. Rhodey landed beside them and knelt.

“It’s okay,” Tony said, “You’re gonna be okay, buddy.” Rhodey had pulled back his faceplate and he caught Tony’s eye. He looked grim, and he shook his head, just barely. “Don’t give me that look,” Tony said to him, and he fought to keep his rising panic out of his voice.

“Loki,” Thor gasped.

“He’s fine,” Tony lied.

Vision rose out of the smoldering warehouse, cradling Loki in his arms, and laid him gently on the grass a few feet away.

“Try not to move,” the Vision said softly.

Tony heard Loki say, _“Ow,”_ in a tone that said that this entire situation was a major inconvenience and he was going to want to speak to a manager. Yeah, he was fine.

“No,” Thor coughed, and there was blood on his lips, _“Loki.”_

“I’m _coming_ ,” Loki snarled, rolling over and dragging himself to his feet. Thor calmed, and tried to unwind himself, and then cried out in pain as Loki dropped to his knees beside him and turned him roughly over.

Loki’s gaze slid over him. “Oh, do quit your whining, Thor,” he said, “You’re barely even dying.”

Thor coughed violently and Tony realized he was laughing.

Loki gripped the hilt of the sword. “Ready?” he asked.

“No,” Thor answered, and howled as Loki tore it out of him anyway. “It’s fine,” he rasped at Tony’s livid expression, “If he — was nice about it — I’d think I really was — going to die—”

“Hush,” said Loki, almost tenderly. As if to make up for it, he snapped, “Stop _moving_.” Thor obediently stilled. Loki’s hand hovered over the wound, which glowed a warm golden light from within and slowly began to mend itself.

Thor took a deep, measured breath and said, “That’s enough,” long before the wound was fully healed. Loki persisted a moment longer before he stopped, and Thor dragged himself into a sitting position, groaning. He gave a sympathetic hiss and tugged at Loki’s torn tunic, where blood was slowly starting to darken the leather.

Loki brushed his hand away. “It’s fine,” he said, and started to stand, wincing slightly.

Thor was examining Loki’s blood on his hand with a look of concern. “Loki—”

“What about you, Stark?” Loki said. “Dying? I can never tell with mortals, it seems to come on very suddenly. You’re such fragile things—”

Loki took a step toward him and Tony backed away, putting up his gloved hand between them.

Loki raised his eyebrows, but stopped. “ _Really?_ I thought we’d moved past this,” he said.

“Yeah, you know what’s scary is I thought we had too,” said Tony.

“Tony, what—” Thor started, but Tony cut him off.

“When were you gonna tell us that he tried to kill you before your sister showed up?”

Both of the brothers looked confused, then Loki started to laugh. And it was _that_ laugh again — that bitter, humorless sound he’d made in the quinjet and when Thor had called him _kin-slayer_. It meant something, and Tony adamantly did not care what, because _how dare_ Thor let him come anything close to trusting this _two-faced prick?_

Rhodey looked at Tony in confusion. “What?”

“That’s not—” Thor tried to say, but—

_“Fine,”_ Loki spat, “Treat your own wounds.”

“Wait—” Thor tried to interrupt again. He grabbed at Loki’s arm and Loki pulled away from him. “Loki, _stop_.”

Loki trudged past them, back toward the facility, and Tony leveled his repulsor at him and shot. It hit the ground in front of Loki and he flinched back from it. He spun around and glared at Tony — angry, dangerous. There was a dagger in his hand. _Good_ , that was the Loki he knew.

“Don’t you _dare_ go back into my house, you _backstabbing son of a bitch,_ ” Tony snarled.

All of them were talking at once. Thor was trying to object and Loki wouldn’t even let him speak. Rhodey was confused, and he couldn’t force even a moment of quiet to ask what had happened. Vision was trying to diffuse the situation, and — damn him — he was over next to Loki, putting his hand on the Asgardian’s shoulder. Whose side was he _on?_

When had it started to rain?

“Tony, stop,” Thor said. “He didn’t try to kill me.”

“Like he didn’t kill Odin?” Tony snapped. “You want to tell us how _that_ went again? Because you’ve seemed kind of confused about it. I’m sick of you covering for him.”

“Don’t,” Loki said to Thor, when he tried to speak. “Don’t _bother_. I don’t need your hospitality, Stark.”

“Yeah, I’m sure _Stephen Strange_ will find his alien study buddy worth the risk of a knife in the back.”

And Loki was gone, then, in a furious flapping of wings and angry-bird-screeching and Thor’s helpless cry of, _“Wait.”_

“What the hell is going _on?_ ” Rhodey asked. He looked at Thor, who was shaking his head.

“They _fought_ ,” said Tony, “Before Hela got here.” He looked at Thor, who was saying _no_ , repeatedly. “He killed your father and he tried to kill you — that’s what happened—”

“—no, no, no, Tony, _no. No!_ ”

“That isn’t—” the Vision’s calm, quiet voice cut in “— _precisely_ what she said.”

“She said—” Tony started.

“—that one of them had tried to kill the other,” the Vision said. Tony nodded. Except nobody said anything, and he kept nodding, but the anger in him was being replaced, slowly, with something tight and cold. The cuts on his chest throbbed painfully.

“Thor,” said Rhodey. _“Fuck.”_

Thor’s face was in his hands. Finally, he said, very quietly, “I was _angry_.”

*

Jane Foster was lying in bed with her eyes closed, listening to the rain. Of course she was. Because what mortal who had loved the God of Thunder could ever work on a night like this, with the sounds of the distant city (which she hated, anyway) drowned out by the loud, insistent patter of the storm? It was only the most relaxing sound in the universe, and now it came with a side order of heartsickness, too. Also it was like midnight.

Her phone pinged again, and she told herself this time she was going to tell Darcy off, but when she picked it up, on top of the unanswered messages from her intern — which read _“R u okay? (rainy emoji)”_ and _“Jaaaaaaaaane :(”_ — was one from Thor.

_“I can’t stay here,”_ it said, _“Can I come over?”_

She texted back, _“Of course,”_ and the address.

Jane told herself she didn’t need to clean up. Thor had seen her van at its worst, this place was a paradise by comparison. She still cleared off the table and put her papers in order (she’d been meaning to do it anyway, she told herself.) They would have to have somewhere to sit if they were going to talk and catch up. Except it was midnight. Crap. What if he just needed somewhere to sleep? She cleared her books and binders off the couch. Most of them ended up back on the table, but that was fine. They could sit and catch up on the couch.

What did “I can’t stay here” mean? Like he couldn’t stay there at _all_ (wait, where was _there_ , anyway?) or like, was he fighting with Spider-Man and he needed somewhere to cool off? Was Spider-Man an Avenger? That was stupid anyway. Why would he fight with Spider-Man? Everybody loved Spider-Man.

He was probably fighting with his brother. Jane wondered if the Avengers had thrown him in superhero prison or something. If they had, Thor probably wouldn’t have been fighting with him. Maybe they’d let him join.

That was both a hilarious and terrifying prospect. Loki, an Avenger.

She thought of Loki shielding her with his body while Thor struck the Aether with lightning. She thought of Loki throwing her out of the way of a black-hole grenade and nearly getting sucked into it himself.

She’d thought of those things a lot, after Svartalfheim. She’d thought of them at night as Thor had lay in bed beside her, whispering his brother’s name in his sleep. She’d thought of them every Friday when she filled the little vase in the cupholder of her van with fresh flowers and reminded herself that two gods had died so that she could live, and that meant her life had to be worth it.

Screw Loki. (She hoped they’d let him join.)

At one in the morning, she wondered if Thor had decided to stay _there_ after all, or if he’d gotten lost, or if he’d accidentally sent that text to the wrong person to begin with. When she went to the door, she could see the shadow of someone sitting out there on the frosted glass.

She unlocked the door and pulled it open, and said, “Why didn’t you knock?”

And then she saw him, and sucked in a breath.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, “Is that blood?” She walked over to stand on the stair beside him. He was hunched over, phone in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” Loki said. He turned his face up to her and gave her a crooked smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “When I saw your message I knew you thought—” the smile faltered momentarily before he set it back in place. He swallowed hard. “You don’t have to let me in. I just—” _didn’t have anywhere else to go._ He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

She hugged him. He was soaked to the bone.


	9. Builders and Destroyers

“What productive little creatures you mortals are,” Hela said, when she walked into the dockside warehouse and found her followers had nearly completed their tasks. She dropped the Iron Man chestplate at the feet of the engineer who was putting the finishing touches on their counterfeit War Machine and ran her hands appreciatively over the gleaming golden armor.

Stark could never have built something so beautiful (even if it _was_ his design from which they’d worked) Knock thought to herself. It truly looked like a product of Asgard — sleek and gold. They’d left the horns on for the helmet, and Hela had etched runes into the metal herself. It was a work of art, and it was going to destroy armies.

“When I have claimed Asgard,” Hela said, “Perhaps I’ll have to employ you to make more of these machines of war.” Knock was thrilled at the prospect, even if she knew _employ_ really meant _enslave_.

Hela would bring Earth — _Midgard_ , Knock thought gleefully — into a new age. _An axe age, a sword age._ It wouldn’t be _good_ , precisely, but there would be magic in it, and gods. There would be change. There would be power.

Around them, men and women were arming themselves with confiscated Chitauri weaponry, doing last checks on guns and bullets and body armor. This was it: the beginning of the end.

“We know our orders,” said Knock. “We’ll see you at the finish line, Hela.”

Hela put her hand on Knock’s neck and squeezed slightly — intimate and uncomfortably tight. She leaned in close and said, _“Don’t fail me.”_

“Never,” Knock gasped.

Hela released her and, with a last look over her little kingdom (though it wouldn’t be little for much longer!), walked back out the door and flew off to look for a nice place to begin her siege.

“She’s going to kill us all,” said Smith, from inside the suit. They had named it _Draugr_.

Knock had never been a fighter, so she couldn’t wear it herself, which was a tragedy. Maybe someday, if she lived. Knowing Hela, maybe even if she didn’t.

“See you in Valhalla, then,” she said.

“Think it’s real?” asked Smith, “Valhalla?”

Knock laughed. Eight years ago, she would have been laughing for a different reason. Before Loki, she would have said _no, never._ But now?

“Why not?” she said. “Asgard is.”

 

*

 

 _“I’m sorry, let me see if I understand this,”_ said Strange to Thor over Rhodey’s phone, _“You **lost** your brother?”_

“I did not _lose_ my brother,” said Thor. “He left. I called his — my? — phone and he didn’t answer.” He’d called it six times. He didn’t mention that.

_“Do I need to look for **him** now, too?”_

Thor thought about that. “No,” he said, finally, sighing. “I don’t think he’ll take kindly to being hunted down if he wants space. Just… tell me if you hear from him. Please.”

 _“If I wake up tomorrow to find my city full of aliens, it’ll really put a damper on my day, Thor,”_ said Strange, as if he was going to be sleeping at all with Hela loose in the city anyway. He hung up. Thor handed the phone back to Rhodey, who was scrolling through the burned-down warehouse’s inventory on a tablet.

“This is not an invitation to go looking,” Tony was saying. He was pacing back and forth, phone to his ear.

“No. Stay in. It’s too late for you to be out anyway.”

(A pause.)

“I said _stay in_. Just call me if you see something. Do not engage. Do not go anywhere near her. You can’t take her on.”

(Another pause.)

“Like, she took me out in like five seconds and then almost killed Thor, that’s how strong. Yes, Thor’s back. No, you can’t—” he looked at Thor and cleared his throat, “Maybe later. It’s not a good time.”

Thor smiled in spite of himself and said loudly, “Is that the _new Avenger?!_ When do I get to meet him?!”

Tony pulled the phone away from his ear and Thor could hear the kid (it was definitely a kid) on the other end of the line talking loudly and excitedly. Tony covered the mic and said to Thor, “I hate you.”

Thor grinned at him.

When Tony finally hung up, Rhodey said. “Security’s still going through the wreckage, but we can make some guesses. Happy’s down there now, overseeing. Selvig’s helping them identify some stuff. They took salvaged Chitauri tech, confiscated HYDRA tech, even the goddamn portal machine from New York.”

“They can’t use that without the Tesseract, right?” Tony asked. He looked at Thor, who shrugged.

“Loki said the Tesseract was still on Asgard,” said Vision.

Nobody said, _“But is it?”_ but Thor was sure all of them wondered. Except Tony, perhaps, who was still stinging from his earlier misjudgment and subsequent overreaction.

Thor didn’t blame him for the conclusion he’d jumped to — he only wished that both of them would have shut up long enough for him to explain what had actually happened.

Which he still hadn’t.

Thor crossed his arms over his chest and stared out at the rain, which was fast approaching apocalyptic in severity. Damn Hela.

The room had gone quiet. Just the incessant beating of the storm and the occasional ping of Rhodey’s phone as people sent him updates.

“Hey,” said Tony, quietly. He had come over to stand next to him, looking grimly out the window, hands in his pockets.

“Don’t apologize,” said Thor, trying to be gentle, “I do not blame you.”

Tony huffed. “Hey, you don’t even know what I’m gonna apologize _for_.”

He swallowed, cleared his throat.

After a second, he said, “We, uh. We’ve always kind of given you shit for being… you know, like, the dumb jock of the team, all punch first and ask questions later…”

Thor chuckled. He knew. For his childhood, that had been his reputation on Asgard, too. He and Loki had always been _the strong brother_ and _the smart brother_ — never mind that Loki was an exceptional fighter and Thor was no slouch in his studies. They were only ever lacking in comparison to each other.

“…But,” Tony was saying, “That’s not — you know, with a couple of notable exceptions —” he rubbed his neck, “That’s not what you’re like. Whenever a fight’s about to go down, whenever things are getting hairy, you’re always up to try to talk it out first. So whatever happened, whatever Hela saw… it’s not you.”

The words lightened a weight Thor didn’t realize he’d been carrying. He’d always thought of himself as brash and impulsive — particularly in comparison to Loki, who was constantly thinking a dozen steps ahead of everyone else — and he’d tried hard to break himself of those habits. Especially once he’d seen the kind of damage he was doing. Especially once he no longer had another half to do the thinking-ahead for him.

“I was not always so,” Thor said. “I don’t know if you can understand this, but I was once a much different man. A man that I am… not proud of.”

Tony looked up at him, a little half-grin on his face, and a sudden puff of laughter escaped him. “Sorry,” he said, “It’s just—” Thor heard a snicker from behind them. He looked over his shoulder to see Rhodey still looking down at his tablet, but he was grinning widely and shaking his head.

“I do not understand.” Thor said, giving Tony a confused look.

“Do you know — no, of course you don’t. It’s just… I used to have a nickname.” To Thor’s continued confusion, Tony said, “They used to call me the _Merchant of Death_.”

In fits and starts, Tony told him a story. A story of weapons of war, and a kidnapping, and a betrayal. He told Thor of Ho Yinsen and the cave in Afghanistan where the Iron Man was born. He told him of Obadiah Stane.

A kidnapping was not a banishment, a business partner was not a brother, and yet Thor couldn’t help but see parallels. Once they had been the thoughtless princes of their worlds, and they had each been brought low, and betrayed. They had each risen determined to make right the wrongs of their pasts.

Thor was humbled by the sudden realization of how far Tony had come, how much he had _built_. And Thor — what had he done?

He’d _run from it_.

Once, Odin had said that Mjolnir had no equal as a weapon to destroy or as a tool to build. But Thor had only ever destroyed. ( _“You are a destroyer, Odinson,”_ Heimdall had told him, in his vision.)

A destroyer.

Would he never be good for anything else?

“You should be proud, Tony,” Thor said. “You’ve made something truly incredible of your kingdom. I hope one day I can build something as worthy of my own.”

Tony scoffed and sputtered. Suddenly he had to _go check on something._ He asked FRIDAY for completely useless status updates as he fled the room.

“You’re gonna be a good king,” Rhodey said.

People had been telling Thor that all his life. For the first time in a long time, he thought it could be true.

 

*

 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jane asked, after Loki had finished assuring her that the state of his health was no reflection of Thor’s.

“No,” he said, “I’ve already begged a bed and a shirt from you, I won’t ask you to listen to me whine as well.”

“I don’t mind,” she said, but she didn’t pry.

“I didn’t realize how late I’d kept you up.” She figured that was less an apology than a polite way of telling her to go to bed and leave him alone. No such luck, buddy.

“I study stars,” she said. “I’m kind of a night owl. And it’s just a couch. And it’s your brother’s shirt.”

“I’m sick of borrowed clothes,” he sighed, more to himself than to her. “I want to go home.”

They were curled up on either end of said couch, sipping hot tea from mugs. Well. Loki’s had been tea at some point, anyway. He had drunk most of it, then produced a bottle of some amber Elvish liquor with which to refill it. Jane suspected she was enabling some kind of bad behavior, but when he’d offered her the bottle (he advised strongly against it, but said it was impolite not to) she’d just held out her mug and said, “Hit me, baby.” He had poured the absolute tiniest possible amount for her, which was adorable, until she took a mouthful and had to go to the sink and pour the entire thing out. (“Jesus _Christ_ , what is that? Paint thinner? You’re a masochist.” When he’d finished laughing so hard he was clearly hurting himself, he’d assured her that he was.)

“Why _don’t_ you go home?” she asked.

“The Bifrost won’t answer my call.”

“You don’t need the Bifrost, though, do you?” Jane asked. “Being able to walk between worlds, that’s like your whole _thing_ , right?” She tried not to sound jealous.

“It’s a long walk for an uncertain welcome,” he said. “Ugh. Tell me about your work. How fare the stars?”

“Closer than ever, but never close enough,” said Jane with a sigh. She glared at him. “But really. Why don’t you go home?”

“Are all mortal women so brutally insightful?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “Why don’t you go home?”

“You’re terrifying,” Loki said.

_“Loki.”_

“I can’t,” he admitted. He stared determinedly into his mug and fiddled with his fingers. Finally he said, “My magic isn’t what it was. Before Svartalfheim.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I got home afterward, but only barely,” said Loki. “I followed the course we took back into the pathway but then I almost couldn’t get out. If the Convergence hadn’t made it so much easier to get through….”

“Would you have been just… stuck in there forever?” Jane was genuinely horrified at the prospect.

He frowned, and shook his head. “The paths shift,” he said. “New branches forming and old ones corroding constantly as the realms move around and through one another. Eventually it would have collapsed.” She opened her mouth and he said, “Don’t. Don’t ask.”

She sat in silence, biting her lip. Finally, unable to contain it anymore, she said, “But what—”

“Don’t,” he said again.

“So you’ve—”

“ _Yes._ Don’t.”

She sighed and slid down in her seat. He drained his mug.

“It’s just—” he gave her a stern look but she continued “—I wonder if it could happen to me, if I botch something with one of my machines. I wish you’d been around sooner, for me to ask some of this stuff.”

He tilted his head at her. “What kind of machines?”

“Oh, you know,” she said casually, sipping at the last dregs of cold tea in her cup, “Prototype portals.”

He gaped at her. Ohhhh, that was _satisfying_. When she told human scientists that she was working on portals between worlds, they mostly either thought she was crazy or theoretical. Loki was an Asgardian. He understood enough to be properly impressed. She sat back up.

“No portals into space yet,” she said. “Just on Earth. Mostly like… a foot apart, really. And nothing can actually go _through_ them, so it’s more like — you’re okay, right, your face isn’t stuck like that, is it?” Jane felt very smug.

Loki shut his mouth. There were a lot of things on his face and she couldn’t tell what any of them meant. Finally, he said, “You can create stable windows through space using _machines?_ ”

“ _Windows_ is a good way to put it,” she said. “They don’t go very far and I don’t have the power to get anything through them.”

“ _Far_ is relative,” said Loki, which made her want to scream and shake him because _yes_. She told herself that it would be very undignified if she started bouncing in her seat. “What kind of power are you using?” he asked.

“Electric,” she said. “Is there any other kind?” That was mostly sarcastic. Aliens used other kinds of power. She’d had a look at one of the salvaged Chitauri power sources once. She wouldn’t have thought it would make a difference.

Loki, wincing as he stretched, set his empty mug on the floor beside the couch, and then put his hands up between them and moved them like he was arranging something invisible. A greenish-gold light flickered off his fingers and an image swam into view in front of her.

She really did start bouncing, then. _Magic._

“What is it?” Jane asked, trying to parse the abstract _thing_ , like a sheet of something transparent folded and twisted around another branching, treelike form. And then, “Wait, no — it’s the _universe_ , isn’t it — the Nine Realms?”

“The _multiverse_ , or part of it. A crude approximation in only three dimensions,” Loki said.

“Yggdrasil,” Jane said, tracing the form of the tree. The illusion broke on her fingers like water, leaving ripples of light where she touched. She grinned at it.

“It winds its way through all the worlds — a great stream of energy, a dimension in itself, inescapably entwined with our own.”

“Does it have a physical space?” she asked. “Is that what your pathways are?”

He nodded.

“Energy,” she said. “Power — is _that_ the kind of power I need to turn windows into doors?”

“It’s one type you could use, certainly. It’s the kind I use.”

She dragged herself out of the illusion to stare at him. “Magic,” she said. “You’re talking about magic.”

He smirked. “One day, when it is not—” he looked at the box under the TV and winced “—three o’clock in the morning, you shall have to meet my friend Stephen. I think you could learn a lot from him.”

“Is he a scientist?” Jane asked.

“He is a sorcerer,” Loki said.

Jane gazed at the illusion as Loki waved a hand and wiped it from existence. She had never entertained the idea that humans could learn magic. But Stephen was a human name, right? She was so wrapped up in the idea that for a moment, she didn’t realize that his expression had changed. He was frowning at her, thoughtful.

“Jane,” he said, slowly, “Who else knows that this is what you’re working on?”

“Anybody with an interest and an internet connection, I guess,” she said. “I’ve won some awards for it.” She tried to sound humble about that last bit. “Why?”

 

*

 

“Turn the lights off,” said Loki, as they pulled onto the college campus that contained Jane’s lab. He could see a black van parked in front of one of the buildings.

“Why?” she asked, but she did it. He pointed the vehicle out to her. He let her creep up as close as he dared before he told her to stop. There were people loading stuff into the back of the van.

“If that’s SHIELD again,” Jane whispered unnecessarily, “I’m going to taser someone.”

Loki chuckled. “Not me, I hope.”

“No promises,” she said with a grin.

“Stay here,” he told her, ignoring her protests. He was invisible by the time he slid out the door, and he walked past the intruders undetected.

They were armed to the teeth, these people. Loki recognized not only mortal weaponry but Chitauri as well. Unlike the human guns, those might actually _hurt_.

Loki heard a metallic thunk and the whir of machinery, and a gleaming golden shape stepped out into the rain.

It looked like one of Stark’s suits. Specifically, it looked like Rhodes’s suit — a little bulkier, less graceful. It was crowned with the einherjar’s distinctive horns and bedecked with dangerous-looking runes. Loki might have found it beautiful if he didn’t find it so egregiously _offensive_.

They’d dismantled Asgardian armor to make this monstrosity, which could only have meant that they’d defiled the remains of the dead. It would have to be destroyed.

It was coming toward him. Loki wanted to inspect the runes on it, so he didn’t immediately get out of the way. It stopped just in front of him and he leaned forward to read the inscriptions, working his way up the chestplate to the helmet. Mostly spells of protection, and a name: Draugr. Morbid, Loki thought, but not unsuitable.

There was a bind rune on the faceplate, and Loki felt immediately very stupid but unfortunately only had time to say, “Shit,” before the thing punched him in the chest and sent him flying.

Sparks erupted across his vision as the fist connected and Loki mentally berated himself for not doing a better job healing his own wounds. He hit the pavement in a roll but couldn’t do more than get to his knees. He forced himself to breathe through the pain. His spell had been shaken loose and the rest of the soldiers began to draw weapons.

Of _course_ Hela would make sure her metal beast could see invisible things. Loki had annoyed her spectacularly with that trick when they’d first met.

He gulped air and forced himself to run. The thing was slow, at least. He propelled two knives into the throats of the closest humans and slipped around the Draugr as it tried to grab him.

The shots from the Chitauri weapons bounced off the metal as they aimed for Loki and he used the armor as cover. He wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long, but he took out two more of them as he ducked the Draugr’s grasp.

“Enough!” came a woman’s voice, and he looked back to see that Jane was being dragged out of her van by one of the soldiers. Beside them was a woman dressed smartly in red, her rain-drenched hair sticking to her cheeks. She had a gun to Jane’s head, but Loki was pleased to see that another of the soldiers was lying on the ground.

They weren’t SHIELD, but Jane had, indeed, tasered someone.

The woman held up her hand and Loki felt more than saw the Draugr back off him. She tilted her head at him and said, “Do you remember me?”

“No,” said Loki.

“I didn’t think you would,” she said. “I wasn’t important.”

She aimed the gun — a little human one — at him and he just smirked. “Who are you?” he asked.

“The rust-red bird at the gates of Hel,” she said, and shot him.

 

*

 

“Leave her, but don’t kill her,” said the woman, putting her gun back in its holster. “She’s a liability but we might need to pick her brain later if things don’t go as planned. Isn’t that right, Doctor Foster?”

Jane was hardly listening. She struggled against the arms that were holding her as the woman searched her pockets for her phone. She tossed it to the machine, which crushed it.

The woman went to stand over Loki, who was lying in the street struggling to breathe.

“You won’t forget me again, I think,” she said. She had drawn the gun again and now she aimed it at his head, execution-style. She seemed to consider.

“I won’t waste the bullets,” she said finally, putting it away. “The rest are for your brother.” And then she snapped her fingers and got into the passenger’s seat of the black van.

The man holding Jane dropped her so suddenly she fell, scraping her palms on the pavement. He followed the others into the back of the van, which was already starting to leave. The metal suit — the weird Asgard-style Iron Man — flew off.

Jane knew she was in shock. The world had an unreal, dreamlike quality. Just a canvas of endless dripping grey and a body lying a dozen feet away that couldn’t _possibly_ be Loki’s.

 

*

 

“Something’s wrong,” said Thor. The rain had stopped and he was shifting uncomfortably, suddenly restless.

Tony’s phone rang and Thor’s head snapped around to look at him. “Loki?” he asked.

Tony shook his head. “You better be in bed,” he said as he picked up. “You better be in your apartment and whatever you’re about to tell me, you better be seeing it on TV.”

 _“Hey, Mister Stark,”_ said Peter Parker, and Tony knew by his voice that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. _“I have some bad news and some worse news and probably even some worse news than that.”_

“If I find out you tracked her down and fought her I’m going to kill you.”

 _“No, I didn’t. I promise. I haven’t seen her. But um. Mister Stark. There’s something in the East River, and I won’t lie to you. I can not tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I am not looking at Godzilla right now.”_ Tony heard a metallic thunk and, _“Shit!”_

“Language!” he snapped.

 _“Okay good news and bad news,”_ said Peter, _“Good: it’s definitely not Godzilla—”_

 

*

 

 _“Well what the hell is the bad news?”_   Tony growled at him.

“The bad news,” Peter said, as a monstrous, twisting body rose from the water and curled around Brooklyn Bridge, “It’s _way_ bigger, and also a snake.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Knock quotes Völuspá (The Wise Woman's Prophecy) from the Poetic Edda a few times. A rust-red bird crows at the gates of Hel to signal the coming of Ragnarok, and the state of mankind is described as "an axe age, a sword age," (broken shields and rampant corruption, when brothers fight to kill one another.)
> 
> I'd like to say I'm sorry for the approximately five hundred cliffhangers I've left you with in this one chapter alone. I'd really like to. And yet.


	10. Unstoppable Forces and Immovable Objects

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Nine paces fares the son of Odin,_  
>  _And slain by the serpent, he fearless falls._  
>  \-- The Poetic Edda (Völuspá/The Wise Woman's Prophecy)

It was laughable, really, that a son of Odin should meet his end at the point of such a pathetic weapon. It was laughable, even as it was grim, but Loki had always had it in him to laugh at grim things. Even lying there on the pavement, on his side, in the rain, Loki had that in him.

What he did _not_ have was _air_.

Midgard was so _heavy_ on him, where it pressed against him. The rain beat against him and hands jostled him relentlessly, tearing at his clothing. He could hear a voice, too — a meaningless clatter of words that pelted his mind but refused to stick.

Blackness ate at the edges of his vision, and it occurred to Loki as his thoughts begun to unravel that it might be the Void. Thanos had snatched away its prey and it had pursued him, like a great wolf, across the cosmos to this place. (Leave it to Loki to wax poetic about the process of losing consciousness, which was what some fast-fading part of him knew was _really_ happening.)

Except that as the pressure of the Earth was replaced by the weightless drift of nothingness, the thought became less poetic and more literal. It _was_ the Void, he was convinced, this darkness rising up around him until Midgard was nothing but a pinprick of light far above. There was no air in it; he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. He was falling. Terror flooded through him in a last, desperate rise of clarity. He did what he’d done in the Void when the awfulness of it had first overwhelmed him — what he’d always done when he’d been afraid and alone and lost, wounded or dying in wilds and on battlefields across the cosmos: he called for help.

Loki didn’t know if the watcher could recognize his name in the wet gasps he managed to push from his body, but when his darkened vision started to give way to empty whiteness, he imagined he was looking up at the stars and the Bifrost was rushing down to take him home.

_Heimdall’s Observatory was empty when the Bifrost threw Loki into it. Outside, it was raining, waves crashing hard against the rocks. A proper tempest — it only stormed like this in Asgard when Thor was in a mood._

_So he must be, and he must be here. Out the archway, just across the bridge — a flicker of red like blood on the wind._

_“Brother?” Loki called. Walking toward him._

_“He won’t stop,” Thor said. “Not until he kills me.”_

_Something was moving beneath them, amid the waves. Loki was reminded unpleasantly of the Chitauri leviathans. A long, lithe body breached the surface of the water — smooth pale scales ridged by huge, bladelike spines the color of rust._

_The ground shook, throwing Loki from his feet. The massive body heaved itself up onto the bridge before Thor, and in the distance, where the head swayed, a pair of crimson eyes cut through the mist._

_“Run,” Loki said. Then louder, “Thor, **run**!”_

_Thor spun Mjolnir and lightning blazed across the black sky, playing across the serpent’s scales. The tongue that flickered forth as it tasted the air was a brilliant, flashing silver._ As silver as your own, Liesmith.

_It hissed, and there were words in the sound, though Loki felt them in his bones more than heard them in his ears._

Mine is the fate of Odin’s son, mighty warden of Midgard.

_“He won’t stop,” Thor said again. “Not until I kill him.”_

_The wyrm struck, and so did Thor. The fanged maw gaped wide enough to swallow the observatory, and a bolt of lightning crashed with enough force to shatter the bridge. The snake’s head rose above the dust, but the lightning had cleaved straight through it like a great blade. It sank, trailing its venom in a fine acid-green mist, and slid from the bridge and back under the waves._

_Thor was left standing at the splintered edge of the bridge. He coughed, shook the poison away, and dropped his hammer, turning back toward Loki._

_“It’s over,” Thor said, the storm clearing. The brothers walked toward each other, and Thor made it half the way before he staggered and fell. Beyond him, a glow was building. Asgard was on fire._

_Loki froze, and there was a sound behind him. He turned, and his chest blazed with pain._

_“You are a destroyer, Odinson,” said Heimdall, driving the sword deeper, until it was buried to the hilt in Loki’s chest, but still it could not pierce as deeply as those golden eyes. “Wherever you go there is war, ruin, and death. In what world could you have ever come home?”_

_Loki grabbed the gauntleted wrists and felt the gold armor shatter in his grasp. He looked down to see his hands had gone the color of a frozen corpse, and from where they touched, frostbite-black overtook the brown of Heimdall’s skin until the watcher collapsed, dead, taking his sword with him. Loki backed away, bleeding._

_He knew before he reached him that Thor was dead. He fell to his knees in the grass beside him anyway, and pulled his brother’s head into his lap._

_“Can I stop this?” Loki asked. He looked up at his father, standing serenely on a cliffside in Norway, looking out at the sea._

_“No,” said Odin, turning to him. “This is the fate of Thor. It cannot be stopped.” His face was grim. His face was always grim._

_“It cannot be stopped,” Loki repeated. His fingers left smudges of dark blood on Thor’s cheeks. Somewhere far away, it was hard to breathe._

_“Fate cannot be stopped,” said Odin. With something like a smile, he said, “And while you **can** run from it, I will tell you from experience: you will tire before it does.”_

_Loki laughed, despairing. Indeed — he remembered that day in the vault. Fate had caught up with both of them then._

_“What is Loki god of?” Odin asked him._

Some do battle, others just do—

_“Tricks,” Loki said bitterly._

 

*

 

The snake had not seemed overly interested in the little creatures scurrying around it until Peter had started bothering it, which he was now regretting. He swung over the bridge and under a coil of the monster’s body and the head pursued him. At first, he’d hoped to tie it in a knot, but so far that hadn’t worked.

Peter skimmed past the end of the bridge as he went to web up the entrance so no more cars — or people — could get on from that side. He darted immediately back over the bridge, glad that the monster was more interested in him than the fleeing civilians.

He swung wildly as the snake jostled the cables his webs were attached to. A huge talon rose out of the river and landed on the bridge with a crunch.

Okay, so not like a _snake_ snake. That was fine. Peter was pretty sure it counted as a dragon now. He really hoped somebody was filming this. When Ned found out he fought a dragon, he was going to _die_.

The thing was so big, with so much to keep track of, Peter almost missed that it had drawn back its head. He swung across the cables, and when he felt that sense of danger, like static on his skin, he dropped a web to the bridge and yanked himself downward to dodge the strike.

It didn’t come — instead, the serpent swept its head across and sprayed a stream of neon-green liquid that hissed as it hit the cables. Peter heard the pops and twangs of the cables breaking and the cracking of the bridge and the web he’d flung up to catch himself went nowhere. He fell, flailing, toward the falling edge of the bridge as the monster’s fanged mouth closed in on him.

It snapped shut as a gleaming red-and-gold blur snatched his hand and pulled him away.

“Too close, kid,” said Tony.

“I had it — I mean, I could have—” Peter didn’t even need to see his face to know the look he was getting from behind the Iron Man mask. “Thanks, Mister Stark.”

The dragon was no longer following him — it had been distracted by the Vision, who was shooting beams at it from his forehead. It snapped at him and he phased through the back of its head, turned, and resumed beaming it.

“Don’t get hit with that acid, Vis,” said Tony, “I don’t know what it’ll do to vibranium and I don’t want to find out.”

“Noted,” said Vision.

“Hey, while you’ve got me, can you fly me up to the top?” said Peter, “I think I saw something on one of the towers — uh… Brooklyn side.”

Tony flew them up over the fight and toward Brooklyn, where Peter could see the approaching figure of War Machine, similarly toting Thor by the wrist. Tony tossed Peter toward the tower and said, “What took you two so long?”

Peter missed the answer (or maybe interrupted it) as he flung himself up onto the top of the tower and said, “Hey!” he pointed, “That’s your hammer, right? Muh... midge....” Everything screeched to a halt as Peter’s senses went haywire.

“Mjolnir,” said Tony, as the Vision yelled out a warning.

Peter reacted first, snagging Tony with webs from both hands and jerking him back out of the way. War Machine tried to dodge, but the spray of venom hit him and Thor both (it was glancing, Peter hoped as much as saw) and they dropped out of the sky.

“Rhodey!” Tony roared. He severed the webs with a repulsor shot and dove after them, but the snake got in his way. “Rhodey, talk to me—”

They heard sputtering (they must have hit the water) and — _“He’s all right, Stark. I’ve got him,”_ said Thor. Then, _“He says you guys have to have a talk about protecting the arc reactors on the suits better.”_

“Get him out of here,” said Tony, sounding relieved for a split second before the snake caught sight of them in the water and started after them.

 _“Shit—”_ said Thor.

“I got it, I got it!” Peter webbed the back of its neck and swung around the tower but the thing was just too massive. The tower wasn’t going to hold it. “I don’t — I don’t got it!”

“Here!” Tony said, “Web it to this!”

“Are you serious?” Peter said, but he did it. The snake, which had drawn back for a strike, stopped mid-snap. He swung back and forth, reinforcing the straining webs. “Why did that even work?” Peter said, shaking his head at Tony in disbelief.

Tony cackled as the serpent struggled futilely against the stubborn weight of Mjolnir. “Un _worthy_ ,” he said.

 

*

 

Stephen Strange was not surprised to be woken up at nearly four in the morning to the sound of his phone ringing. He _was_ surprised when he picked it up and the first thing he heard was a woman’s voice asking if he was a _medical_ doctor.

“I was a surgeon, why?” he said, brain still fuzzy with sleep but quickly clearing. People who needed medical doctors often had medical emergencies.

_“Loki’s dying. He said you were a friend.”_

Strange dragged himself out of the armchair he’d dozed off in — he’d wake up faster on his feet.

“Where is he and why is he dying?”

_“Larrington University. He’s been shot.”_

How a bullet could even damage an Asgardian was a question for later. A few questions in (Was he conscious? Was he breathing? Shot where, exactly? Was there an exit wound?) and Strange had already decided he liked her. She was clearly shaken, but she was level-headed enough to give precise answers and she wasn’t squeamish.

When he and Wong walked through a portal a few seconds later, she just said, “That was fast.”

He nodded at her as he knelt beside them. “Doctor Stephen Strange,” he introduced himself. “You are…?”

“Doctor Jane Foster,” she said.

“ _Not_ a medical doctor, I presume,” he said. Between the three of them, they managed to get Loki back through the portal — he was much heavier than he looked.

“Astrophysicist,” she clarified.

 

*

 

“—practically black, Stephen! Blood is not supposed to be that color!”

“He’s an alien, Christine. It’s not human blood.”

“Well, I mean, that does explain some things,” said Christine Palmer, “Like why needles just don’t work on him. So, great. I have an alien bleeding to death in my hospital. Thanks. This is it. This is my life now.”

“A magic alien,” said Jane, for no other reason than to impress upon her yet again the absurdity of the situation. (Darcy had been a bad influence on her, Jane decided.) Christine looked at her like her head was on backwards.

“I don’t know how you got dragged into this,” Christine said, “But I’m _so sorry_.”

“Oh no, that’s not, uh, Stephen’s fault. His—” she indicated Loki “—brother flew out of a hole in space and crashed into my van. We dated for a while.”

Loki shot up in the hospital bed, gasping. _“Thor,”_ he choked. Christine staggered back into Strange.

“Yep, that’s the one,” said Jane.

“Holy shit,” Christine whispered. Then, “Is that it? He’s fine now? He wasn’t breathing for like fifteen minutes, he should have brain damage.”

“Is that all?” Loki wheezed, voice shaky.

“It takes a lot to kill a god, I guess,” said Wong with a shrug. He rubbed Loki’s back as the Asgardian doubled over, coughing violently.

“How did you know he was gonna bounce back from that?” Strange asked Jane as Christine walked over very cautiously to examine Loki.

“Oh, I saw him survive way worse than this, I’m pretty sure,” Jane replied. “But, you know, the bullet in his chest was new, I didn’t know if that was gonna be a problem.” To Loki, she said, “You’re an asshole, by the way? I think I forgot to tell you that.” Loki held up his hand in an “okay” gesture.

“If you’re not human, I literally have no idea what I’m even looking for at this point,” Christine said apologetically, taking his pulse.

“I do,” Loki said.

Jane tuned out the resulting medical lingo (the gist of which seemed to be that if Loki was human, he’d be really, really, dead, so good thing he wasn’t) and said to Strange, “You have no idea how bad I want to talk to you about magic stuff, but my equipment was stolen by an evil Asgardian Iron Man and I have to deal with that first.”

Ah, there it was. Now that she could stop being worried, Jane was just pissed off. She was starting to understand why supervillains did their mad science covertly in secret bases under active volcanoes. People didn’t steal your shit when you lived under a volcano.

“I’ll help if I can,” Strange offered, which was very nice of him.

They were interrupted when the door flew open and a doctor leaned in. “We need you in the ER,” he said to Christine. Behind him, hospital staff were in a frenzy.

“A big accident?” she asked, following him out.

“A lot of little ones,” he said as he left, “There’s some kind of attack—”

_Some kind of attack._

“Why is everyone looking at me?” Loki said, “I’ve been busy dying.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Late chapter is late! This chapter was meant to be much bigger, and I almost held it off until Sunday, but it's getting split into two parts I guess!
> 
> Marvel's Midgard Serpent also has legs, just for the record. However, as Marvel's Midgard Serpent is ugly as sin, that role will be played by Monster hunter's Shah Dalamadur for the duration of this fic.  
> 


	11. Brothers and Blood

Coughing up water, Thor dragged Rhodey onto the shore and collapsed into a sitting position next to him.

“This sucks,” said Rhodey, starting to pull off his armor. The metal from his right arm across his chest was corroded, pockmarked where it wasn’t stripped completely, but at least the venom hadn’t burned through to the flesh beneath.

“No kidding,” said Thor, who hadn’t been quite so lucky. His left arm was blistered from elbow to wrist, with fierce burns where the poison had landed. The water had helped — not to mention the fact that Rhodey had taken the brunt of the hit — but he was certain that a direct hit would have done serious damage.

His throat burned, too — and not just from inhaling the river. “Whatever that serpent is, its venom could kill a god,” said Thor.

“Fantastic,” said Rhodey, removing the last of his suit.

Thor nodded. “If Mjolnir’s there, we know Hela’s behind this,” he said.

“What the hell for?” said Rhodey, “What’s her endgame? She’s got to get back to Asgard, right? How does this accomplish that?”

“I don’t know but—” Thor was interrupted by the sound of some kind of whiny… music? “What… what is that? Is that your phone?”

Rhodey was digging in his pocket for it. When he answered it, he immediately snapped, “Where the hell have you been?”

That _had_ to be Loki, Thor thought. Rhodey made eye contact with him and nodded.

“Yeah, I bet he’s not. He’s fighting a giant snake—”

Thor heard a loud exclamation from the other end of the line (probably “a _what?!_ ”) and Rhodey winced back from the speaker.

Rhodey listened for a moment and said, “No, he’s right here. He and I got hit with some kind of poison spray and we’re kind of— hello?” He turned to Thor. “He hung up on me! Your brother’s kind of high-strung, huh?”

“He usually hides it better,” said Thor, concerned.

“—can’t believe I’ve cast this spell to locate people so many times this week I have it memorized,” came an annoyed voice as a burning portal was cut into the air beside them. Strange waved at Thor and said to Loki, who was peering anxiously over his shoulder, “See? There he is, he’s fine.”

Loki scoffed. “I wasn’t _worried_.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why were you worried?” Thor asked, as Loki shoved his way past Strange and through the portal. “Loki, what happened to you? You look awful.” He looked like all the blood had been drained from him. Remembering the injuries he’d had when he’d left the Avengers facility, Thor mused that that might be exactly the case.

Dark blood, Thor remembered — nearly black on his hand next to the bright red of his own. He wanted to ask about it but now wasn’t the time.

“You should talk,” said Loki, flopping down to his knees beside him, “What did you do to your arm?” He tugged at it and Thor held it up for him to examine.

“ _I’m_ fine, thanks,” said Rhodey. “Is that a hospital?”

“A hospital? Why were you in a hospital?” Thor asked Loki, who was trying and failing to work a healing spell on his injured arm.

“He got shot,” said a familiar voice. “Hi,” said Jane, a little awkwardly, when he looked up at her.

“What are you doing here?” Thor asked, hoping like he sounded worried (which was true) and not like he didn’t want to see her (which might have been true or not — he wasn’t sure.)

“I think your sister stole my research,” said Jane. “If she can get one of my prototype portals working with magic or whatever, she could create her own personal Bifrost right back to Asgard. Are you okay? Your face is doing a thing.”

Thor shut his mouth, which had been hanging open. “You — you got a prototype working? I had no idea you were that close, I—”

She waved her hand but she did look very smug. Thor wanted to bounce to his feet and pick her up and kiss her, but Loki still had a hold on his arm.

“Wait,” said Thor, “What do you mean he got shot?” He looked at Loki. “You got _shot?!_ ”

“I can’t heal this,” Loki grumbled. Fear gripped Thor’s insides like a vise — how weak must his brother be if even his magic was failing him? Thor cupped the side of his neck and he could feel Loki’s heart throbbing beneath his fingers, painfully fast.

“Rest, brother. It can wait.”

Loki shook his head at the concern in Thor’s eyes and batted his hand away. “It’s not me, it’s the wound,” he said. “It resists my magic.” Thor wanted to laugh with relief at that. At least it was only his arm he was in danger of losing, and not his awful, untrustworthy, trouble-making brother.

“I know Hela getting to Asgard is probably worse,” said Rhodey. “But there’s still a giant snake thing destroying the city.”

“Jormungand,” said Loki, standing. “The Midgard Serpent. Father cast it out of Asgard so it couldn’t play its part in Ragnarok. I’m sure he never imagined Ragnarok would start _here_.” When he noticed Thor staring at him, he said, “Surely you didn’t think you’d be the only one to see it coming?”

“I didn’t know there was anyone else _to_ see it coming,” Thor reminded him irritably. “What part is it to play, exactly?”

Loki didn’t answer, staring off into the distance at the great serpent. Thor could see him thinking hard. He got to his feet and helped Rhodey up.

“We’ve got to find Hela,” Thor said. He looked at Jane. “Is there any way to track those portals?”

“Not unless she uses one,” Jane said.

“You could call Mjolnir, that’ll annoy her,” said Loki. Still stubbornly refusing to believe he was unworthy, Thor noted. He didn’t know whether to feel annoyed or reassured and had to settle for an uncomfortable mixture of both.

Rhodey shook his head, “She doesn’t have it, it’s up on the bridge.” He nodded toward the distant form of Jormungand.

“Think she’ll be with her minions?” Strange asked.

“Maybe,” said Thor, “Why?”

“Another damn ‘find person’ spell, that’s why,” he said, producing something small and gold from a pocket.

“Is that the bullet your girlfriend pulled out of Loki’s chest?” said Jane, looking slightly horrified.

Thor winced at the thought and took the bullet from Strange’s hand to look at it. “What is this made of?”

“Exactly what it looks like,” said Loki.

“It can’t be what it looks like.”

“Does it look like the uru-gold alloy that the einherjar’s armor and weapons are made from?” asked Loki. When Thor nodded, he said, “Then it’s exactly what it looks like. Which reminds me, they’ve got one of Stark’s suits, only it’s made from _that_. They call it Draugr.”

“Shit,” said Rhodey. “That’s why she wanted the arc reactor.”

Thor took a moment to let this sink in. For the first time, he was beginning to think they might be outmatched.

“Well, good talk everyone,” said Loki, snatching the bullet from Thor and handing it to Wong. “Good luck with Hela. Try not to die.” He clapped Strange on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go.”

Strange looked confused. “What? Go where?”

Loki pointed at the bridge.

Strange shook his head. “Oh no. You’re in no condition to fight.”

“Good thing I’m not going to fight, then,” Loki said. “I’m going to help _you_ get _that thing_ into your mirror dimension.”

Strange looked at Wong, who shrugged. “It could work,” he said. He held up the bullet. “I can do this.”

“Remember,” said Loki, looking Thor in the eyes, “That—” he pointed at the serpent “—is a distraction. Don’t let Hela slip away because you’re worried about something stupid.”

“Like you?”

“Right.”

Strange and Wong had begun their spells. Thor touched the communicator on his ear and said, “Tony! Loki and Strange are incoming. They’re going to try to trap the beast. Hela may have found a way off-world. Rhodey, Wong, and I are going to track her down.”

 _“About time Gandalf joined the party,”_ said Tony.

Thor grabbed Loki’s arm before he could leave and gestured to him. “Phone,” he said, prying the communicator off his ear and giving it to him. Loki handed the phone over and wiped the communicator off before putting it on. Then he stepped through the portal — no last look, no goodbye — and was gone.

Thor looked at Jane, “You should stay… somewhere.”

“Right,” she said, “Since you know how to work my machines and all.”

Thor looked at Rhodey for support and he just said, “She’s got you there, man.”

“It’s pretty close,” said Wong. “Get ready.”

 

*

 

Strange and Loki walked through the portal out onto one of the towers of the bridge and Loki found himself face to metaphorical face with Mjolnir. He scowled at the hammer.

If it was here, so was Hela. Where was she? Why had she left it?

_Fate cannot be stopped._

Loki looked between the hammer and the snake and a thought hovered on the edge of his mind, insubstantial as smoke. He brushed it away. Even if it was possible, it didn’t matter now. Unless—

He walked to the hammer and looked down at it. He wasn’t worthy, and so he couldn’t hold it. And yet.

And yet.

Thor was worthy, and he could not. Hela _couldn’t_ be worthy, she just couldn’t be. Loki bent down, his hand hovering over the handle. Willed his brain to shut up. Grasped the handle. Lifted.

It didn’t budge, because _of course_ it didn’t. Never mind, then.

“Can you hear me, Stark?” Loki asked. It took him a few tries to work the little communicator.

_“Loud and clear.”_

_“Likewise,”_ said the Vision.

 _“I uh — me too!”_ said another voice — an adolescent, if the voice was any indication.

Loki’s mouth quirked. “ _That’s_ not a voice I recognize,” he said.

 _“I’m Spider-Man!”_ he said, _“Nice to meet you!”_

Tony groaned audibly. Loki knew what that groan meant. It meant _please do not let this innocent, impressionable child try to make friends with the monster_.

Loki would never _dare_ admit it, but he liked kids — liked people before they allowed age and responsibility to make them _boring_. Loki knew how to be nice when he wanted to. The fact that it would annoy Tony was just added incentive — payback, perhaps, for so unjustly turning him out.

“Well met, Spider-Man,” he thought for a swift moment, “I am Loki, brother of Thor and sorcerer of Asgard.” Thor, magic, or aliens — surely he would find one of those subjects impressive.

_“Sorcerer?!”_

Loki was inordinately pleased.

 _“Yeah let’s— let’s just stick to the fight, here. We can all geek out later. Is there a plan here, Dumbledore?”_ Tony did _not_ sound pleased. Loki knew that particular tone of not-pleased — the one that said _you haven’t technically done anything wrong but I don’t like it and later we are going to Have A Talk_. Good.

Loki looked at Strange, who was surveying the wreckage. “Can you do it?” he asked.

“I… maybe? I’ve never tried to get anything so big into the mirror dimension before.”

“I can lend you power if you need it.”

Strange was shaking his head. “I’ve got the power for it, I think. What I really need is for it to stop _moving_.”

Loki heaved a sigh. “I can manage that, I think.” He said to the Avengers, “Strange will try to pull the serpent into another dimension, but he needs it to be immobilized. I need you to fall back so it’ll stop going after you.”

Tony started to ask what he was going to do but Jormungand made a snap for the Vision and smashed into the tower where Loki and Strange were standing, throwing them both off of it. Strange’s cloak kept him aloft and Loki swore at himself. He should have practiced that flight spell.

He twisted in the air to try to get his bearings and was about to change his shape when Iron Man hit him hard in the side, grabbing him and swooping down over the bridge to set him down.

“I can handle a little fall, Stark.”

 _“Yeah it’s, uh. Kind of a reflex.”_ He moved to fly off but Loki didn’t let go of him.

“Wait. If this doesn’t work,” Loki kept his voice low and Tony let the faceplate of the suit come up. He looked uncomfortably as if he thought Loki was about to say something sentimental. Loki licked his lips. “If this doesn’t work, do not let my brother fight this monster.”

Tony looked confused. “What? Why?”

“If he fights it, he’ll win,” Loki said, “But he’ll die. Understand?”

“Does he have an allergy?”

“He has a destiny.”

Tony looked disturbed, but he nodded. Around them, the other Avengers had pulled back, and the serpent’s head swept around until it spotted them. The armor snapped back into place, and he was the Iron Man once more.

 _“What are you going to do?”_ Tony asked. Loki released him and he flew off.

“Just have a conversation,” said Loki.

 _“This thing can **talk**?!”_ Spider-Man queried incredulously.

“It has been talking this entire time,” Loki said. “Just not in a language you can understand.”

 _“Wait,”_ said Tony, _“Are you telling me your Asgardian universal translation thing lets you speak **snake**?”_

Loki tried to get the serpent’s attention as it moved past him. “It’s not a snake,” he said, “It’s a jotun.”

_“Jotuns are giant snakes? So you’re—”_

“No,” said Loki, “They are — _we_ are — shapeshifters.” To the snake, which had caught his eye and begun to slowly encircle him, he said, “Hello, brother.”

“Brother,” it hissed, but Loki couldn’t tell from the tone whether it was in acknowledgment or confusion.

“I am Loki,” he hesitated, “Son of Laufey. King of Jotunheim.” Precisely which of those names belonged to a king, Loki left deliberately vague. Let it ask, let it wonder and talk. He was buying time, not information.

“No name I know,” the snake hissed, quicksilver tongue flicking out to taste the air. “No king I know.” Of course not. It was ancient — it had probably slept here, beneath Midgard’s waves, since long before Laufey’s reign.

“Why do you fight?” Loki asked it. _Him_ , Loki thought. Not _it_.

“Vengeance,” Jormungand answered, without hesitation. “Mine is the fate of Odin’s son, Midgard’s mighty warden. Mine is the life-blood of _Thor_. I have come to claim it.” He opened his mouth and fangs began to unfold from within it — fangs as long as Loki was tall. Bright venom dripped from his mouth and hissed and sputtered on the pavement.

“But _why?_ ” Loki asked, “What quarrel have you with Thor?” It drew close, staring through him with a single massive vermilion eye, and Loki imagined his reflection in it was corpse-blue and marked. He felt sick, and told himself it was the blood loss catching up to him.

“Brother you are, I think, Loki Aesir-Shaped,” Jormungand whispered dangerously, “But _not mine_.”

Before he could move to strike, Loki lunged forward. He pressed his hand to the smooth scales and the serpent went rigid.

_An ominous gold-clad man, blue eyes flashing, dark hair spilling over his shoulders and mingling with his beard. A woman at each side of him — a gleaming golden witch, young and fierce, so beautiful it hurt; a sharp, shadowy shield-maiden, no more than a teenager, jade eyes bright with madness. Battle-bloody, all of them. He took up a serpent in his hands and cast it down from a high cliff into a sea far below. Falling, falling—_

Loki wrenched himself away.

He’d bought himself a moment, but the serpent was already shaking himself out of the induced haze. Loki ran for the swiftly-descending curtain of the mirror dimension but he already knew he wasn’t fast enough, not injured as he was. The snake would catch him before he passed the spell’s threshold.

 _Fate cannot be stopped,_ his father had said. Since when had Loki ever listened to his father?

“He won’t make it,” said the Vision. Soft and logical.

“I can get him!” shouted the boy.

“He can take care of himself!” Stark insisted. There was fear in his voice. There was always fear in his voice.

Loki heard none of them. The serpent’s roar consumed him. “I taste him on you. The scent of his blood beneath your chosen skin. I know you, lie-smith. _Son of Odin._ ”

Something hit Loki in the back, fast and hard. He was swept off his feet and together they tumbled across the battered bridge as the hole in the world closed with the Serpent trapped behind it.

He was gone. It was done. If fate couldn’t be stopped, Loki would run from it.

He pushed himself to one knee as Stark’s unruly apprentice whooped with joy. He liked the boy, Loki thought, but he had about had his fill tonight of being manhandled by these well-meaning mortal _heroes_.

“See, Mister Stark?” he said, “I told you I’d be fast enough.”

“You are nothing but trouble,” Tony said, landing beside them, “Good job.”

He offered Loki a hand and the Asgardian shook his head. “I need a minute,” he said breathlessly, shifting to sit. The hand settled on his shoulder instead. Loki leveled a wry grin at Tony and said, “What is it you owe me now, dinner and a drink?”

“Gotta stick around to collect it,” Tony replied

Loki silently commended himself for slithering into the good graces of these mortals. If ungrateful Asgard would not have him when he and Thor returned, perhaps Midgard wouldn’t be so bad a place to hide.

The sound of Mjolnir flying past interrupted their moment of rest and drew their eyes to the end of the bridge.

Drew their eyes to Hela, crowned in her antlers, her lovely face twisted into an ugly mask of rage.


	12. Draugr

Wong’s portal brought them to the outside of a squat dockside warehouse not far away. In the distance they could still see the bridge, the towering form of Jormungand writhing and snapping in response to the flickering lights of Tony’s repulsors or Vision’s beams.

The group crouched behind a shipping container and tried to get a headcount of the guards stationed outside without drawing attention. Neither Thor nor Rhodey were particularly stealthy, and Thor found himself wondering why his supremely sneaky brother had picked _him_ for the infiltration mission when there was a perfectly good monster he could have been punching. He snuck another glance back at the bridge and thought stubbornly that he’d probably killed bigger monsters before. With Mjolnir. Well, maybe not _bigger_ , but certainly _as big_. When you put a few of them together.

“One on the roof, one in the alley, not facing us. Two on the back door who is,” said Rhodey, interrupting that unhelpful train of thought.

“Two on the roof,” said Thor, otherwise nodding. “Normally I wouldn’t worry about stealth, but…”

He didn’t have to finish that thought. Jane was not a fighter at all and Wong, while competent, was no match for a bunch of guys with guns. Thor grimaced.

“Problem?” Rhodey asked.

“Just thinking that usually I can draw fire off the rest of the team without any worry, since the bullets can’t pierce my flesh. If they’ve got bullets that _can_ , I’m no tougher than any of you,” Thor said.

“I don’t think they’ve got whole guns full of them,” Jane said. “The woman who shot Loki didn’t want to use more bullets after she’d shot him once.”

“Any distinguishing features?” Rhodey asked.

“ _Oh_ yeah,” said Jane. “Red hair, red outfit. Everyone else was in black.”

The distant crunch of breaking architecture called their attention back to the bridge, where one of the towers was coming down. Maybe it wasn’t too late to swap.

“Are we sneaking in?” asked Wong, “I think I should keep an eye on the bridge to bring in the cavalry once they’re done there.”

“I don’t see how we can. They’ve got guards at the door and we don’t have any way to take them out silently,” said Rhodey.

“The mirror dimension’s good for more than just magic duels,” Wong said. Rhodey’s face lit up with comprehension while Jane’s brightened at the word _dimension_.

Wong made a few gestures and the world around them crackled and faceted as he drew them into the mirror dimension.

“That is way cooler from the inside,” said Rhodey. “I’m still mad at you guys for leavin’ me and Vision behind. Tony told me that fight was incredible.”

“What fight?” asked Jane as they stood and, with unnecessary caution, followed Wong toward the back door of the warehouse.

“When Tony first brought those two home, Strange tried to capture Loki. They fought, and I have it on good authority that it was awesome.”

Thor shrugged. “I’ve seen better. Loki barely used any magic at all.”

“It was awesome,” Wong confirmed. He waved his hand at the side of the warehouse and the bricks folded away to form a doorway. “I turned the room upside-down.”

“Holy shit,” said Rhodey.

“Are… are they going to notice that?” asked Jane.

“It doesn’t affect the real world,” Thor explained.

At one point, the place must have had a basement, but the floor had been removed and now all that was left of the ground floor was a catwalk around a sunken chamber. In the middle was some kind of round metal doorway, surrounded by heaps of parts and scrapped machines.

“That’s…” Jane said, “That’s one of my machines — sort of. It’s way bigger than it’s supposed to be. And _that!_ ” Jane jabbed a vicious finger at a woman in red loitering beside the portal. “That’s the woman who shot Loki.”

“I know her,” said Rhodey, frowning. “SHIELD picked her up after New York — one of the people Barton hired while he was under Loki’s spell. Arms dealer maybe? She’s HYDRA now. She’s got a funny name. Nod? Knock. Galina Knock.”

Thor felt a surge of anger. Mostly at this woman, for shooting his brother — but also at Loki, for possibly having deserved it. However vile her occupation or loyalties, he couldn’t fault her for violence aimed at someone who’d once controlled her mind.

His thoughts were cut off by the sounds of heavy machinery (muffled by the dimensional shift but still recognizable) as a gold-clad figure walked out from under them and approached the portal.

“Of course,” Jane said, “They’re gonna need a self-sustaining energy source to keep the portal open… a Stark Industries arc reactor would do the trick. I mean, that’s what that thing in the chest is, right?”

“Aw, man,” said Rhodey, nodding, “That’s my _suit_. That’s _my_ suit. Couldn’t they have ripped off one of Tony’s?”

“Have we got a plan?” Jane asked.

Thor nodded. “You and Wong go keep watch. When the others have finished their battle on the bridge, lead them here. Rhodey and I will clear the warehouse.” He looked at Rhodey, who was pulling a gun out from a holster at the small of his back. “Cover me, and take out Knock if you can. I’m not afraid to take a few hits from the Chitauri weapons, but I’ve seen what a bullet does to a mortal and I’d really rather not experience that firsthand.”

“Try not to shoot the machine,” Jane said. “It’s _on_ , even though it’s not currently trying to connect anywhere, and I don’t know what would happen if it got damaged or interrupted in the process of constructing a bridge.”

“Want to try to ballpark it for us?” Rhodey asked.

“Mm,” she looked thoughtful, “Best case scenario? Nothing, the whole thing just shuts down. Worst? I honestly have no idea.”

“If it’s anything like the Bifrost, probably a hole into the Void big enough to consume the building,” said Thor.

“Right. Don’t shoot the machine or we all die,” said Rhodey. “No pressure.”

Wong found an out-of-the-way spot behind some discarded boxes and made a portal out of the mirror dimension. He nodded to Thor and Rhodey and wished them luck, and closed the portal behind them.

After a brief conversation which took place entirely in gestures, Thor and Rhodey burst from their hiding place. Thor heard two gunshots as he bulldozed the pair of HYDRA agents between himself and the stairway down from the catwalk. For good measure, he threw the second one across the warehouse to smash into the last agent on the catwalk.

Knock had ducked around the other side of the portal machine, and Rhodey had her pinned there with cover fire. Thor heard her swear.

He was too impatient for the stairs, he decided. Instead, he vaulted over the railing and into the fray, laying one agent low with a punch and lifting another to swing him at one of his allies and then throw him into the face of the Draugr.

It slowed the metal-clad man briefly. By the time he recovered, Thor had cleared the room with the exception of the agents huddled with Knock behind the portal generator. The Draugr swung at him and Thor matched him punch for punch. His strength was shocking; enhanced, Thor could see, by a number of runes etched on the edges of the metal plates. The metal didn’t break beneath his fists, and he knew his knuckles were going to be badly bruised when he was done.

There was only one thing to be done, really.

Thor gripped one of the Draugr’s wrists and pulled him off-balance. He slid around to the side and knelt, putting his other hand at the armored man’s waist, and hefted the whole thing over his head.

“Rhodey!” Thor roared, “Duck!” Rhodey dove to the side as Thor threw the Draugr bodily through the upper wall.

A HYDRA agent on the catwalk (when had he gotten up there — or had Thor missed him?) aimed for Rhodey while he was distracted, and Thor barely had the time to tell him to look out as the man barreled toward him.

Thor almost didn’t hear the sound behind him as Knock left her hiding place. Almost didn’t have time to jerk out of the way as she leveled the gun at him and fired.

A searing pain burst in his shoulder.

“Thor!” he heard Rhodey shout, but he didn’t have time to see why, she was aiming again and he had to keep moving.

A pair of massive metal arms wrapped around him from behind, then heaved him off the ground. Thor struggled against the Draugr’s hold, gripped the wrists and bent them out, away from him, but it was too slow. He couldn’t move.

Behind him, he could hear Rhodey still struggling with the agent on the catwalk, and Galina Knock was aiming that gun at his head.

“Say hello to your brother for me,” she said, and then the crack of a gunshot filled the air.

Knock fell to the ground, her gun clattering to a rest beside her hand.

When Thor remembered how to breathe again, he looked up at the catwalk where Rhodey was lying, gun still outstretched toward them.

“You’re welcome,” he said. He kicked the dead HYDRA agent off him and over the side of the catwalk, the railing of which had been ripped off when Thor had thrown the Draugr earlier.

“This is gonna be way better than the tank story,” Rhodey admitted.

 

*

 

Mjolnir sliced through the air, a breath ahead of Loki, as he staggered back away from Hela. A bolt of lightning hit the Vision and a thrown sword cut Spider-Man’s web, sending the poor kid plowing into the ground with an audible, _“oof!”_ She spun and kicked Loki in the chest, sending him flying back into the side of a car, which crumpled beneath the impact.

“You meddlesome little shit,” she snarled. “Every time I find myself making headway, there you are with some stupid trick. You’re not even a proper threat — just a nuisance.”

“No need to be _hurtful_ ,” Loki whined as he scrabbled out of the way of her next swing.

“I’ll show you hurt,” she said, latching onto the car and swinging it at him. He rolled out of the way and the next lightning bolt — aimed right where his dodge landed him — hit Loki straight on, sending him sprawling.

It wasn’t as strong as one of Thor’s, he thought disdainfully.

Strange was dropping portal traps beneath her feet, but she wasn’t stopping long enough for them to get her. A volley of the Iron Man’s missiles bought Loki time to get to his feet and start weaving a spell.

A portal appeared in the air near Strange and Wong poked his head out of it. He started to say something but Hela interrupted him with a shriek of rage and a throw of Mjolnir, which Loki hoped but couldn’t confirm that Wong dodged.

Loki rolled over the hood of another car and ducked behind it as she let loose a salvo of shrapnel at him. Loki swore viciously and abandoned his sorcery. If she hadn’t thrown Mjolnir….

“She wants _me_ —” Loki started to say.

 _“Yeah no kidding,”_ said Tony, annoying her with a repulsor blast and then dodging out of the way as she threw a weapon at him.

“—so the rest of you can get out of here,” Loki said. “I can handle this.”

 _“Yeah, that’s definitely not gonna happen,”_ said Tony—

—as Spider-Man shouted, _“No way! She’s crazy strong!”_

The Vision flew around her, hitting her with the beam from his forehead. _“That does not sound advisable,”_ he said, _“I calculate close to a zero percent chance that you can do damage to her at all.”_

“My deepest thanks for your words of confidence in my fighting prowess,” Loki grumbled, “But actually I didn’t plan on trying to best her.”

 _“What **are** you going to do, then?”_ Tony asked.

Hela sufficiently distracted for the moment, Loki ran to the side of the bridge and dove off of it.

He heard an, _“Oh,”_ from Tony over the communicator before it was gone.

 

*

 

“Come _back_ , you _insufferable cur!_ ” Hela howled over the side of the bridge, ignoring the scurrying mortals in favor of heaving blade after blade into the water after her obnoxious little brother.

_Coward._

She turned back to the mortals and found them slipping through a door in the air. Fine. She could kill them first, she supposed.

The gateway began to close before she could reach it, to her annoyance. Hela put her foot on the bottom edge of it and her hand on the top, and forcibly opened it to accommodate her. On the other side of it, the mortal sorcerer (she assumed) fell back with a look of horror.

“That’s impossible,” he said, as if saying so would somehow stop it from happening.

“Darling, you have no idea what’s possible,” she told him, flinging a knife into him as she passed and ignoring the horrified squawks of his friends.

Beyond them, there was a loud crash as her Draugr threw Thor through the wall and flew after him to continue smashing brutally at him. At least _someone_ had things well in hand, Hela thought appreciatively.

She walked to what had once been the back of the warehouse and took in the state of her minions. Thor had ripped through them like they were no more than fine china. Which they were, basically. Not even _fine_ , really.

Thankfully, their actual state of aliveness mattered exactly nothing to Hela.

“Get up,” she commanded them, and they did.

 

*

 

Rhodey didn’t move as she walked past him. He may as well have been furniture for all the attention she paid him. He quietly backed out of the way and back out of the warehouse and he didn’t stop moving. When the HYDRA agent he’d killed minutes ago heaved himself to his feet and took up his gun, Rhodey shot him (again) wordlessly and kept moving.

He slipped around Thor, fighting the Draugr, and went to where Jane was helping Wong drag Strange away from the fight and over toward the dock, where Rhodey could see Mjolnir embedded in the dirt. He tried to cover them when the shooting started up again, but wasn’t very successful. The newly-zombified HYDRA agents had no fear of being shot, and got up again moments after being re-killed. This had officially stopped being a fight that a regular human was going to be useful in, especially one that was running out of ammo. Should’ve picked up one of those Chitauri-ripoff HYDRA guns.

“How bad is he?” Rhodey asked Wong, after they’d gotten him past the shipping containers and out of sight of the battle.

The sorcerer shook his head. “I can’t fix this but I think I can stabilize him and get him to the hospital. He’s out of the fight, anyway.”

“Is he gonna be all right?” Jane asked.

“Even getting stabbed in the stomach, I think he’s still having a better night than Christine,” said Wong.

“Oh, shut up,” croaked Strange. Wong snickered, but he patted Strange on the shoulder as he turned to make another portal.

“You should go with them,” Jane said to Rhodey.

“We should both go with them,” he replied with a frown.

She shifted from foot to foot, peering around the shipping container at the fight, which had descended into complete madness. She shook her head. “They’re gonna need me to turn off that machine. Don’t worry,” she added, “I’ll keep my head down.”

It wasn’t exactly a time for indecision. Rhodey helped Wong get Strange through the portal into the hospital and stepped back out before he closed it.

“I can’t leave an unarmed civilian in the middle of this chaos,” he said.

“I’m not unarmed, I have a taser. And I’m really more like chaos adjacent.” She grinned.

Rhodey chuckled. “You think a taser’s gonna work on one of those things?”

“It worked on _Thor_.”

He stared at her, but before he could decide whether to ask when she’d tased Thor or how that even worked when he was the god of thunder, a pale hand shot out of the water and _thunked_ onto the dock.

 

*

 

“Jesus,” said Rhodey, “I almost shot you. I thought you were one of those zombies.”

“There are zombies now?” said Loki, hauling himself up to sit on the edge of the dock. He wrung his hair out, muttering unhappily.

“Yeah. I guess that explains the ‘Goddess of Death’ thing.”

“Why were you in the river?” Jane asked him.

“I was a fish.” He didn’t offer any further explanation.

Loki crept up the dock and regarded Mjolnir with a suspicious look, as if he somehow thought the hammer was behind the night’s shenanigans. Jane guessed he’d know what it was capable of better than they would.

He watched Thor fight the Draugr with an expression that grew from annoyance to anger. “Idiot,” Loki grumbled, then again, louder, as he approached, “ _Idiot!_ What did I tell you?!”

The Draugr turned to see him, then swung its gauntlet over to shoot a blast of energy at him, which he dodged. (It missed them by a wide margin, but Jane still saw Loki check to make sure she and Rhodey hadn’t been hit.)

 _“What,”_ Thor yelled, “ _Now_ why are you yelling at me?!”

Loki leveled his hand at the Draugr: “Distraction. Where is Hela?”

The scary horned lady had slipped away from the melee at some point, Jane realized uneasily.

Thor growled but didn’t argue. The gold-armored soldier punched at him with one arm, which Thor caught in his own, then swung the other fist to batter him in his shoulder, which made him stagger.

“Fine,” said Loki, “I’ll go after her. She hates me more than you, anyway.” A wave of green-gold magic slid over him, obscuring him from view.

The Draugr shot an energy blast in the direction he’d disappeared into, but Thor grabbed its arm to stop it.

“Can this thing still see you?” he yelled in Loki’s direction.

The Draugr grabbed Thor’s injured arm and squeezed until his knees buckled, then it picked him up by the front of his shirt and threw him toward the warehouse. Once more, the invisibility flickered off of Loki when he was hit. Both brothers went careening into a wall.

“What is _wrong_ with you?!” Loki snapped at Thor, shoving his brother off of him. “Use your stupid hammer!”

Thor’s response was cut short by another blast from the Draugr’s weapon, which he braced himself for rather than dodge out of the way and let Loki take. Loki criticized _that_ , too.

Good God. They were going to stand there flailing ineffectually at it and bickering like children until it killed them, Jane realized. It was strong — at least as strong as Thor, and better armored — and they were both wounded and only getting weaker.

She looked around but the rest of the Avengers were all mobbed with zombies. (Were there even more of them now than when they’d first started? Where were they coming from?) Rhodey tugged at her arm, trying to pull her back behind cover. She hadn’t realized how close she’d gotten.

Where _was_ Hela? What if Jane was wrong? What if she didn’t need the arc reactor to power the machine? What if they defeated the Draugr only to end up too weak to take her on? Where were all these damn zombies coming from?

Why _didn’t_ Thor pick up his hammer?

Surely that thing couldn’t stand up to Mjolnir. None of them could. Did he not realize it was here?

Jane squirmed in Rhodey’s grasp, but he was stronger than her. “Thor!” she cried. She leaned toward the hammer, as if she thought that if she only pointed it out to him, if he could just _see_ it sitting _right there_ , he could take it up and use it. She reached for it, as if she could grab it herself, to throw it to him.

Rhodey dragged her back, and she heard him gasp, “Oh shit—” as the Draugr turned to them and, before either Asgardian could stop it, blasted her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a battle. (rimshot) The next will be a proper Monday update. Sorry for the wait!


	13. This Day

_“Say goodbye,” Loki whispered._

_“Not this day,” said Thor, weary of his brother’s needling._

_“This day, the next, a hundred years… it’s **nothing** ,” Loki spat. “It’s a heartbeat. You’ll **never** be ready.”_

_Jane listened to them bicker. She couldn’t even hate Loki for it. For all the cruelty in his tone, the words themselves were simply sad. Jane wondered what short-lived thing Loki had had the misfortune of loving._

_God, she had missed Thor. When he talked like this — like he would move worlds for her — she wondered how she had ever thought she could move on from him. How she could move on from this_ **_life_ ** _, this crazy adventure she’d gotten dragged into._

_Government conspiracies and space royalty and magic. This was the point of staring into the stars, wasn’t it? To find an adventure somewhere?_

_Jane Foster had never fallen down a rabbit hole as a girl, she had never walked through a wardrobe into a snowy forest, she had never gotten a letter to attend a magical school. She had learned early on that if she wanted a doorway to another world, she would have to make her own._

_She wanted to live. She wanted to see more worlds, live more adventures, but if the Aether killed her in the next moment, it was still worth it. She had found her door and this was almost everything she ever wanted._

**_Almost_ ** _everything._

 

*

 

Light. Jane Foster’s world was light. Searing, bright and painful. Distantly, she felt Rhodey try to push her down, push her away, as the Draugr’s energy blast hit her.

His strength was _nothing_.

The _blast_ was nothing.

_None of it_ mattered.

Puny. Pathetic. _Laughable_ , against the power of _Thor_.

Jane Foster’s world was lightning, and the world was _hers_.

She felt like she was watching from outside. Watching in slow motion as she strode toward the Draugr, armor crawling up her arms, clicking into place over her body, red cape unfurling behind her. She swung Mjolnir once. Lightning flashed, thunder cracked, and the Draugr was _gone_. She barely felt the impact. The armored man flew through a portion of the warehouse wall that was still standing and landed with a metallic crunch somewhere inside.

Thor and Loki gaped at her. Slowly, Loki shut his mouth. He looked vaguely troubled. Thor looked like he was seeing a sunrise for the first time in his life. A massive grin split his face.

_“Yes!”_ he roared.

Jane looked down at the hammer in her hand. She knew how to do this, right? Mjolnir certainly knew, and it was more than willing to teach her. She gripped the leather wrap at the end of the handle and swung it, and lightning flickered obligingly from it.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s go, then.”

 

*

 

Jane swept through the battle like a thunderstorm. The Avengers couldn’t keep Hela’s agents dead, but Spider-Man could immobilize them. Slowly the field was clearing. The chaos, Loki decided, was well in hand.

Decisions, then.

The air was sharp with unraveling spells. Loki walked quietly by a group of webbed undead and worked a simple disenchantment as he passed them. His very veins ached with the effort, but the creatures slumped unmoving to the ground. Hela’s magic was fraying at the edges, as badly strained as his own.

Loki tried to run through the possibilities, but he was distracted. _You cannot stop fate._ He wondered if the others could feel it — the slow, steady beat of Jormungand against the walls of the mirror dimension. He couldn’t be held forever. (Did it matter? Soon, he and Thor could be gone from this place. Yes, it mattered. Thor would never stand by as a monster threatened his precious _Earth_. Midgard’s warden, indeed.)

Hela was in the warehouse, working the portal machine. That had to be dealt with immediately.

Thor had noticed, too. Loki called to him, and conjured him up a sword.

“Don’t get distracted,” Loki reminded him again. “I’ll stop Hela’s undead from getting up again.”

Thor nodded, taking the offered weapon and starting into the warehouse. Finally listening, Loki thought. He savored the instinctive, unquestioning trust he’d only now regained from his brother. It would be the last time he ever felt it.

_Can I stop this?_ It was the wrong question, he recognized now. Loki could not stop fate any more than he could halt the unrelenting march of time. One did not stop fate, one _changed it_.

Loki was the god of tricks — and were there no tricks of fate?

That was why his father had chosen to give _him_ this message instead of Thor. _Ruthless old man_ , Loki thought, with something almost like affection. Loki’s emotions churned until they settled into a pile he didn’t have the time to sort through.

_(Callous old trickster, Thor might be his son by blood but Loki was his heir in every other way and Odin knew it, had known it at the end, had chosen exile even while he’d known Loki was sitting on his throne, had trusted Loki, had trusted him to rule, had trusted him with this, with his favored son’s life, the most precious thing Odin had left in all the realms, and this was what Loki was, what he was meant for, what Odin had always meant him for, he understood now—)_

It was vindication, and grief, and all sorts of sentiment that Loki had no more time for, because suddenly it was the moment for which he’d been waiting. A lull in the battle, and Loki struck like the serpent that he was, and emptied his venom into his victim.

His chest ached and he pretended it was the pain of his magic, stressed nearly to breaking.

 

*

 

Jane must have knocked the Draugr out cold, because he hadn’t stirred when Hela had connected the suit up to the portal. The machine whirred to life, sparks spitting into the gateway and getting drawn into the center of it like water going down a drain.

“Hela!” Thor roared. He wanted to fling the sword at her but she was standing in front of the machine and Thor remembered what Jane had said about damaging it.

“Mortal technology is so funny, isn’t it?” Hela said as Thor approached her. “All these analogue buttons and switches. They lack the elegance of a touchscreen but there’s something viscerally satisfying about them….” She tapped a few buttons and flipped a switch and little lights came on all over the metal frame, etched runes glowing with power.

Energy crackled, swirling across the empty frame like soap on the surface of a bubble. A disk of white light was very slowly starting to grow at its center.

Hela called a long black sword into her hands. “This is really getting old, isn’t it?” she asked him, “You clearly can’t defeat me. You’ve tried twice and failed even at full strength, with your weasel of a brother at your side.”

Her eyes kept flicking from him to sweep around the room, as if she thought said weasel might appear at any moment. Thor suppressed a grin. Dealing with Loki’s tricks had her good and paranoid.

She stopped, suddenly. Lowered her sword.

“Although,” she said slowly, ponderously. “You are quite strong, aren’t you? These mortals of Midgard certainly hold you in high esteem. Not that that’s difficult, I suppose.”

“Getting nervous?” Thor taunted. She was probably buying time for the portal to open.

Hela laughed. “Hardly,” she said. “But you’re clearly capable. The throne is my right as Odin’s firstborn, but you’d make a fine general, little brother. Let us go home. We can bring about a new golden age for Asgard. Our father conquered nine realms — surely we can do better.” She let the sword drop to her side and extended a hand to him.

No. No, _of course not_ , Thor thought. And yet. To command the Einherjar? To travel across the universe, claiming worlds in conquest in the name of Asgard? Not long ago — only a decade, perhaps — the idea would have been exciting to Thor indeed. In some ways, it still was. That, more even than the throne of Asgard, had been his childhood dream. What if Hela had made her offer to _that_ Thor?

A feeling of unease blossomed in the pit of Thor’s stomach. What if she’d made that offer to _Loki?_

Thor said, “Father said that a wise king never seeks out war—”

“—but he must always be ready for it,” Hela finished for him. “Perhaps wisdom is overrated.”

Her hand was still extended to him. He had not yet said no. Why did he hesitate?

The sound of Iron Man flying through the hole in the warehouse wall interrupted Thor’s thoughts. Tony charged in, a rocket aimed at Hela, who drew back the sword in her hand to throw it at him.

“Tony, wait!” Thor cried, throwing up a hand. Tony hadn’t heard Jane’s warning about damaging the portal, an especially frightening prospect now that it was activated.

He hesitated, looking to Thor, and to Thor’s amazement, Hela stood down. She looked at him with an expression bordering on a grin.

“Change of heart?” she asked him.

Why did he _hesitate?_

“Ugh, look at that,” Hela said. “What an insidious enchantment, to allow one so unworthy to appropriate your power.”

Standing outside of the warehouse, closer to the water, he could see Jane — wielding his hammer, garbed in his armor. Far from being upset at such a thing, he’d been _ecstatic_. If ever there was a mortal worthy of Mjolnir, it was her. She had her head tilted to listen to Loki, who was standing just over her right shoulder, saying something to her.

There it came again, that uneasy feeling. Hela saw his frown and must have misinterpreted it. “Don’t worry, brother. When we get home, I shall lift that spell for you.”

_“When you what?”_ said Tony, voice bewildered.

Jane was nodding. She turned away from the warehouse, and as she did, she leaned into Loki, put her hand on his chest and raised herself up on her toes as if to whisper in his ear. She kissed his cheek instead, and something bolted through Thor that he didn’t _dare_ call jealousy because that was _absurd_.

Hela made a scoffing sound and turned back to her portal.

Jane had turned to the water. Behind her, Loki was weaving a complex spell. What were they doing?

There was an awful cracking sound as Loki broke open the mirror dimension to let Jormungand come spilling out. A thick, noxious cloud of acid-green smoke rolled out after it. Jane charged down the dock toward it, brandishing Mjolnir. Loki fell back, grabbing Rhodey as he went, and the kid as well when he tried to run after her.

The great wyrm writhed in the river, slithering toward them to meet Jane’s charge. “At last!” it roared, “Come to me, _Thor!_ Come to your death!”

_Father cast it out of Asgard so it couldn’t play its part in Ragnarok,_ Loki had said.

_What part is it to play, exactly?_ Thor had asked, and Loki hadn’t answered.

The uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach overtook him. Roiled up into nausea as Thor realized what was happening.

He wasn’t ready.

“Stop! What are you doing?! We have to _help her!_ ” the kid was shouting.

Thor howled Jane’s name. He tried to go to her but arms like uru held him back. Hela had grabbed him.

“What _are_ you doing?” she asked him. Her voice was amused, almost gentle. “It’s only a _mortal_.”

The Vision was floating nearby, trying to find a way to help, but the acid cloud was in his way. Everything it touched hissed and popped and steamed as it corroded. It warped the wood of the dock and ate away the paint on the shipping containers. Hela’s undead were reduced to quickly-evaporating puddles.

Tony hovered just inside the warehouse, too stunned to move. His faceplate had receded and he was staring with a look of horror at what was happening.

Loki staggered to his knees and forced the two struggling mortals beneath him, as if he could protect them from the acid cloud with nothing but his body. It crawled toward them, catching the tails of Loki’s leather coat and eating away at the edges of them.

He was trying to gasp out a spell but his nose was bleeding, thick black blood dripping down his face and off his chin. He’d overspent himself, and for whatever he was doing now he was wringing the energy out of his physical body to do it. The fog stopped in a bubble around him, halted by a net of golden seidr, but the venom was eating away even at that.

Then it began to recede — sucked into a vortex over the river by a sudden wind. It started to rain in silvery sheets, wiping the area clean of venom.

In the center of the maelstrom, Jane battled the Midgard Serpent. Back and forth they struck, the snake and the lightning, and Jane bludgeoned the great head with Mjolnir until it streamed blue-black blood. Finally it reared up and threw back its head in a roar and shuddered… and sank sideways into the river. It slid beneath the water with a splash.

It did not resurface.

Jane landed on the battered dock and slowly straightened until she stood, triumphant. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and the clouds pulled apart like cotton candy to reveal the soft light of early morning. She walked toward them, slow enough that Thor could count her steps — all nine of them — before Mjolnir slid from her hand and she tumbled off the dock into the water.

She did not resurface.

“Well!” said Hela. “I suppose you’re safe from Ragnarok, dear brother.”

Thor shoved her away and she looked at him with surprise. “I will never bow to you,” he told her, all hesitation gone, “I swear to you: as long as I draw breath, you will _never_ sit upon the throne of Asgard.”

Hela’s face twisted into a look of disappointment. She opened her mouth to speak but whatever she was about to say died in her throat as the inside of the warehouse was suddenly bathed in intense light.

The portal churned and flickered and on the other side of it they could see the inside of Heimdall’s observatory. They could look out over the stretch of the rainbow bridge and see the golden spires and blue sky of Asgard. Silhouetted in the doorway was the lone figure of the watchman.

Thor heard Heimdall’s voice, as clear as if he was standing beside them:

_“Stop her, Thor.”_

Beside him, Hela was looking into the portal with a look of undisguised longing. They moved together — Hela striding for the portal and Thor lifting his conjured sword.

Damn the consequences.

Before she could step into the portal’s surface, Thor shoved the tip of the sword into the frame of the gateway, disrupting one of the runes that had been carefully etched into it. The vision of Asgard spiraled away into one of black space, with stars spinning sickeningly across its surface.

“No!” Hela howled. She grabbed the sword and pulled it out but the destination didn’t change. She turned to Thor, sword in her hand — and _screamed_ as the tip of a dagger burst through her chest. She struggled as Loki materialized behind her, one arm wrapped around her and the other driving his blade into her back repeatedly. He was trying to overwhelm her regeneration, Thor thought, numbly. It was a good idea. It might even work, if someone held her still, perhaps.

Thor didn’t move. He felt frozen to the floor.

Hela tried to twist to grab Loki but couldn’t get a hold on him. They slammed into the frame of the portal until it tipped backwards precariously. Hela had begun to bleed — bright red spattering the cement floor.

She gripped the arm around her waist and twisted it until it broke with a series of sickening wet cracks. Loki screamed in pain but continued to stab at her even as she pulled him around her and grabbed hold of his throat.

They looked like feral animals. Teeth bared, snarling and clawing at one another as they grappled. His brother and sister; his awful, unsalvageable, irredeemable family.

Hela was just too strong for Loki alone. Would have been even if he were uninjured, with both his arms and his full strength. He lashed out at her with the knife and she pummeled him into the floor.

Someone was yelling at Thor.

 

*

 

“Come on, back to Earth, big guy,” Tony said, and Thor blinked at him and nodded. “We’ve gotta shut this thing off.”

“I don’t know how,” Thor said, “It’s Jane’s.” Tony’s face fell.

Oh god, Jane. Tony didn’t want to think about it. He glanced at where Hela and Loki were still tearing at each other like rabid dogs. He was slightly surprised, honestly, that Loki hadn’t turned into an _actual_ rabid dog.

All three of the Asgardians had snapped. Hela was consumed with rage, Loki with desperation, and Thor with shock. Tony shook him again. “What do we do?” he said. “Do we break the portal?”

Thor shook his head. “I— maybe? I don’t know. It could tear a hole in the fabric of reality.”

“Okay we’re gonna save that for a last resort, then,” Tony said. He looked at the buttons and switches on the console next to the gateway. He could figure this out. He was a genius. This was going to be fine. “Help your brother,” said Tony, “I’ll figure this out.”

Thor looked at his siblings but hesitated. Tony understood why but this wasn’t the time. He knew what they’d seen — or at least what it had looked like. But Hela was a danger _now_. She needed to be contained or destroyed or she was going to kill them, one by one, even if she had to rip their throats out with her teeth.

But then it was too late, because Hela threw Loki toward them, and he stumbled backwards, tripped on the edge of the gateway, and fell back through the portal.

He should have grabbed the edge of the frame but he didn’t — he reached his hand out for his brother instead. Thor was well within reach. He was fast enough. All he had to do was catch Loki’s hand.

He didn’t. Loki toppled back into the void and disappeared.

Tony didn’t know if it was the lingering shock or if Thor truly had no intention of saving his brother. He didn’t want to know.

Hela barked out a laugh. She wiped blood from her face. “One down,” she said, “One more to go. I’m tired. I’ll see you later, little brother.”

She turned to the hole in the warehouse and jumped up to it and started to walk off. Tony took off after her but stopped before he’d even left the warehouse. Maybe—

Maybe…

Rhodey was leaning against the railing of the catwalk. He put his head in his hands and swore.

Tony looked at the portal. It was nothing but stars in there. Thor had turned to it and was staring into it. Tony heard him say, quietly, “Goodbye, brother.” The words were empty of emotion.

Tony couldn’t breathe.

“FRIDAY,” Tony said. It felt like it took a long time to get enough air for what came next. “How’s the suit doing?”

_“Airtight, boss,”_ she replied.

“I gotta make a call,” Tony said. Pepper’s picture popped up on the display and he heard the line ringing.

When it finally picked up, she said, _“Tony, are you okay? It’s five in the morning.”_

“I know,” he said. “I think I have to do something stupid.”

She didn’t say anything for a beat. _“Be careful,”_ she said, finally.

“Always.”

_“I love you,”_ she said. Tony wanted to say it back but he couldn’t get enough air. The line clicked.

“Tony?” he heard Rhodey call him. His friend was giving him a funny look.

“Hey,” Tony said. “Listen. I’ll be right back.”

“Where—” Rhodey started to say, until Tony turned to aim himself at his destination, and then— _“Tony, no!”_

The tone in his voice made Thor’s head snap over to see what was happening.

“Stop!” he yelled, and reached out, as if to try to grab Tony. It was pretty stupid, honestly, because all that happened was that he got pulled in when Tony dove into the portal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it! The end of part one! I decided I'll just keep it all in this fic and not try to split it into parts.
> 
> This is the point I've been planning to write to for a while. I think it was only supposed to be 10 chapters, but that last night really stretched out. There was so much going on. As for what's next... well. I bet you can guess where our boys are headed.


	14. The Cyclone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Thursday update is a day early, because I love you.
> 
> And because I really, really wanted to post it.

_Fear not, for you are found._   
_You are home, and there is no going back._   
  
_No one leaves this place._   
  
_But what is this place?_   
_The answer is: Sakaar._   
  
_Surrounded by cosmic gateways,_   
_Sakaar lives on the edge_   
_of the known and unknown._   
  
_It is the collection point_   
_for all lost and unloved things._   
  
_Like you._   
  
_But here on Sakaar,_   
_you are significant._   
_You are valuable._   
_Here, you are loved._   
  
_And no one loves you more_   
_than the Grandmaster._

 

*

 

“So…” said the Grandmaster, stretching the word like taffy and rubbing his hands together, “What do we have here?”

“A trespasser,” said one of the guards flanking the interesting creature they’d brought for him. It wasn’t bound and there was no obedience disk on it. There clearly wasn’t a need. “He was caught stealing from patrons of the Contest.”

Oh, okay, it was a he. Just to make sure, the Grandmaster said to the guard, “We’re sure it’s a he?”

“That’s what he says,” said the guard. The Grandmaster nodded.

“So, uh, what did he steal?”

The guard heaved a sigh and turned to his compatriot. The other man pulled a scrap of paper from a pocket and shook it open.

He cleared his throat and began to recite. The Grandmaster didn’t listen — he was too busy looking over the trespasser. He was certainly some sort of sorcerer. The Grandmaster would have known that by the comically long list of stolen trinkets even if he couldn’t see the hair-thin fringe of a glamour over his skin.

They’d let him keep it, the Grandmaster decided. Who was he to say how somebody should look, right?

The list of stolen goods, once concluded, did not contain a weapon. Not a fighter, then, which was a real pity — and surprising, considering the state he was in. An absolute wreck. One arm was definitely broken, and there was a serious weirdness about him — maybe some kind of curse. The Grandmaster clucked his tongue.

“You’ve been pretty naughty, haven’t you?” he said, “You know we don’t really — say, actually, when’d you uh, arrive here on our lovely little space rock?”

The trespasser licked his lips. He was awfully pretty. The Grandmaster wondered if that was the glamour. If so, it was a good choice. “Yesterday,” he said, in a quiet voice. Okay, so maybe like a literal wreck, of a spaceship. That might account for his battered condition, though not the curse.

“Yesterday?” the Grandmaster exclaimed, “Well, I mean, I guess that explains some things, now, doesn’t it? Now, we aren’t real big fans of stealing here on Sakaar—”

The trespasser gulped and nodded. His eyes were filling with tears.

“—but I mean, since you’re not exactly from around here, I guess maybe we can uh. Forgive you.”

A tear slid down the trespasser’s cheek and he brushed it away hastily, as if he didn’t want anyone to see.

“So,” the Grandmaster said, shooing the guards away, “What’s your story, anyway, how’d you end up in our neck of the woods?”

The trespasser burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed, “I just… I’m so _lost_. I’ve been so lost for _so long—_ ”

“Ohh, sweetie don’t cry—” the Grandmaster beckoned to Topaz and she handed him her staff. “Oh, hold on just a — the melt stick? Really? No, a handkerchief, I’m looking for a — you know, for the — thank you.”

She had taken the staff back and found him a handkerchief. He used it to mop up the trespasser’s face and it came back with a spot or two of what the Grandmaster assumed was blood on it.

“Don’t you worry, sweetheart. You’re not lost anymore! Whoever you were before, wherever you came from—” the Grandmaster waved his hand dismissively, “Doesn’t even matter. You belong here now. You’re not lost anymore. You’re _home._ ”

The Grandmaster put a gentle arm around his new friend. The young man leaned gratefully against him and turned his big, expressive mint-green eyes up to the Grandmaster’s. They were so sad. So sad and _lost,_ but a shy smile had begun to creep onto his face.

“So I, by the way, am the Grandmaster. I guess you could say I’m uh, the head honcho around here. I created the Contest of Champions, which is where my friends here picked you up. So, uh— and you are?”

The trespasser hesitated. “I’m no one anymore,” he said finally, looking away.

“No one? Don’t be ridiculous! I can definitely tell you’re,” he put his hand beneath the trespasser’s chin and lifted it so he could look into his eyes, “You’re definitely somebody _special_. But uh, come on now. Let’s start with a name…?”

“Loki,” he said.

“Loki,” the Grandmaster purred. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

 

*

 

Loki relaxed on a couch in his nice new clothes in the middle of what the Grandmaster called a _quiet dinner party_ and sipped something bright pink from a delicate glass. He tried to decide, as he spun the sad tale of his fall from grace, whether the fact that the Grandmaster put the quirks of his ego on such obvious display made Loki’s blatant exploitation of them unfair. Did he feel like he was cheating, or like he was giving this man exactly what he was asking for?

He’d only needed to have one listen to that laughable _patron of the lost_ spiel to know exactly what buttons to push. Hela had even had the kindness to shove him off to Sakaar nicely injured — a poor little broken-winged bird for the magnanimous Grandmaster to nurse back to health.

And if a little voice inside Loki said that his _broken and lost_ act maybe wasn’t all an act… well. Good alcohol was something Sakaar had in excess, and that little voice could shut right the hell up.

“So, Loki,” said the Grandmaster, when the conversation lulled, “Do you uh… like games?” Games, of course, being the Grandmaster’s singular obsession.

Loki fashioned himself an innocent smile. “Of course, Grandmaster! Who doesn’t like games?”

The Grandmaster rubbed his hands together and grinned, and Loki thought at that moment they were probably thinking the very same thing —

This was going to be fun.

 

*

 

Tony had expected one hole into space to be like any other, and that was really where he went wrong, he decided. He figured he would fly in, find Loki floating around, and drag him back to Earth.

What hadn’t occurred to Tony was that there were a lot of things in space other than emptiness and alien armies.

There were also, for example, big fuckoff wormholes.

There wasn’t enough panic in the universe for what Tony felt as it sucked in him and Thor, who quickly lost his grip on Tony and was swept away. The suit creaked and shuddered, the lights and systems on the inside of the helmet guttered out, and Tony was alone in the dark.

He didn’t know how long he fell. He didn’t know if he was falling at all, or if he was even conscious.

And then the suit came back on, and it was screeching warnings at him, and outside there was a wide expanse of blue sky and the surface of the Earth hurtling up at him. Tony blasted off just before he hit the ground.

He skimmed over what looked to be some kind of… dump. Visions hit him as he looked around — a sky peppered with wormholes with debris spewing out of them, a massive city, ships floating over the piles of trash.

Oh god.

“FRIDAY, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Tony said. But of course, the suit had no access to communications from Earth and the AI didn’t respond.

There was an alarm going off somewhere, a deep, mechanical honking. Nearby, a blocky ship lifted off from a trash pile and began to pursue him.

“Okay,” Tony said to himself, “It’s gonna be okay. I’m on a strange planet being chased by aliens, everything is fine.”

Everything was _not fine_.

 

*

 

_Brother, what have you done?_ The words repeated in Thor’s mind, a litany of anguish winding like a serpent through the cracks between every thought. He was in denial. He couldn’t possibly have seen what he thought he’d seen. He couldn’t possibly have watched his brother engineer the death of the woman he loved. There was some explanation, some plan. There was a reason for everything Loki did.

He was like their father, that way.

Thor tried not to think of other ways that Loki was like their father.

He stared through Jane’s portal, into a swirling field of stars. Everything had piled up, one terrible thing after the next, and Thor felt buried in it all — unable to move, to think, to process it.

_Stop_ , he thought. _Think_. What could he do? How could he fix this? _Actions, Thor. Obsessing over minutiae is your brother’s job._ The thought was supposed to lighten him up a bit, but instead it made him feel worse. That had been Loki’s job, too — getting him to lighten up.

There had to be a way to fix it.

There had to be, didn’t there?

There had to be. What was the first step?

_Get Loki?_ Thor’s brain supplied helplessly. Thor forced himself to stop just staring at the space inside the portal and start actually _looking_. Could he see Loki? (No. Maybe it was just too dark.) Did he know those stars? (No, it wasn’t a system he’d seen before.) Why was everything moving? (The portal wasn’t tethered correctly. Stars didn’t move that fast, therefore it was the gateway itself that was moving.)

He’d _just_ fallen through it. He couldn’t have gone far. He was still there, if Thor could reach him.

Except that he wasn’t. He was nowhere to be seen. There must have been something outside the gateway’s view that had grabbed him — the gravity of a planet, perhaps.

Instinct told Thor to just plunge into the portal anyway. If there had been nothing to hold him back, maybe he would have. But Hela was still here, on Earth. He’d let her go, and now he had to fix that, too.

Without Loki.

It wasn’t a _decision_ , because Thor couldn’t see another option. It wasn’t a decision if there was nothing to choose between. There was only stay and fight, or fling himself into the void with no reason to expect that would solve anything. That wasn’t a choice.

“Goodbye, brother,” Thor said, softly. The words sounded as hollow as he felt, like the heart had been ripped out of him. He tried to tell himself that this wasn’t _surrender_ — it was defeat.

Rhodey shouted, and the sound was like a bucket of ice water dumped on Thor’s head. He looked back, expecting to see Hela accosting somebody and instead realized that Tony was about to dive straight into the portal.

If he’d been thinking, Thor would have realized that actually, this was not _that_ bad of a plan. Assuming the Iron Man suit was capable of space flight (and after New York there’s no possible way that it _wasn’t_ ) Tony was the best bet they had to try to retrieve Loki. But Thor didn’t have time to make those connections, and in that moment all he thought was that his inaction had allowed his brother slip through that portal and there was no way in Hel he was going to let anyone else do the same.

It was all Thor had left to think, as they fell into space and the wormhole that had lurked just out of sight swept them up in its current like a whirlpool: _Loki, what have you done?_

_And what have_ **_I_ ** _done?_

 

*

 

On Earth, James Rhodes stood in front of a broken portal into space and considered his options.

Tony, Thor, and Loki had all fallen into this thing. He wanted to believe they were going to come flying out again, but he was a realistic man. He knew he couldn’t count on it. Strange was safe — maybe he could find them.

The Vision and Spider-Man had been outside, but his ears told him they were no longer there. He didn’t know where they’d gone. After Hela, maybe.

Hela was still out there, and so were some of her HYDRA agents. Not all of them had been killed in his and Thor’s assault on the warehouse, and he hadn’t counted Knock among the zombies that had gotten up to take on the Avengers. He’d downed her with a body shot; she could have survived it if she’d been wearing a vest.

Rhodey retrieved the address of the warehouse from a GPS-powered map on his phone. He texted Pepper to tell her that Stark Industries needed to buy the property ASAP — he didn’t know if the portal could be moved and they couldn’t risk it if there was even the slimmest possibility that they could still get their friends back out of it.

He’d text Strange later; the man was probably in surgery. He had another call to make first.

“Happy,” he said, when the man picked up, “We’ve got an emergency. I need you to send Eric Selvig to the address I’m about to text you, but first I need you to find something for me. There’s a box in Tony’s workshop — yeah, that one. Send it with Selvig, along with any ex-SHIELD you can scrounge up. When you’re done there, call the kid and find out where he went. Give him my number and tell him to call me.”

He hung up and texted the address to Happy. Then he picked up one of the HYDRA guns and started dismantling the Draugr, careful not to disrupt the power to the portal.

 

*

 

Nick Fury was a man who understood what was important in times like these, Rhodey thought. The man drove up to the warehouse behind Eric Selvig with a car full of fully-armed ex-SHIELD agents and the first thing he did was hand Rhodey a cup of coffee.

“Thank God,” Rhodey said. He’d been up all damn night.

He and the Vision (who had returned just before the cars rolled up) briefly recapped everything that had happened. A full debriefing could wait until they’d learned what they could (both about the portal and from Mark Smith, the HYDRA agent who’d been wearing the Draugr suit) and the rest of their allies could be assembled.

“I sent Peter home,” Vision said, “He’s offered to head back to the hospital after he’s gotten some rest. If we’re in need of allies…” he trailed off. They were, and they both knew it.

Rhodey nodded. “If you know where she’s at, go get her. We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

“ _All_ the help we can get?” Vision asked.

Rhodey pulled a somewhat dated flip-phone from the box he’d instructed Happy to send him and turned it on. When it booted up, he selected the only number in its memory and hit _send call_.

“All of it,” he said, and lifted the phone to his ear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EVERYONE ON THE PARTY BUS TO TRASH PLANET.
> 
> Thus begins **Part 2: Patron of the Lost**


	15. There Ain't No Party Like a Sakaarian Party

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize if there's a little skipping around. Even though there have been some significant changes, some events are pretty much the same as in the movie, and I want to just straight-up transcribe scenes from Ragnarok as little as possible.

What a shit day, reflected a woman with no name as she skimmed over the scrapfields of Sakaar. It was noonish and she’d seen nothing of value yet, she had a hangover, and she’d misjudged the size of the booze stash she’d left aboard the Warsong. She’d been nursing the same too-small bottle of piss-poor Sakaarian beer since she left the city and she was seriously considering just turning in for the day empty-handed. Debt was nothing compared to being sober.

A really shit day. At least when she got back, she knew where to find a good drink.

She was heading toward the city when she noticed another scrapper’s ship squatting in her territory like a toad. Not today, assholes. She was in a foul mood.

Warsong clunked down behind the gathering of scrappers scurrying around whatever valuable they’d found. Some guy. Beefy, blonde, probably Xandarian or Terran. Not really worth a fight, but that wasn’t the point. If a scrapper didn’t protect her territory, she wouldn’t have one.

She walked out of the front of the ship and chugged the rest of her beer as the gangplank lowered, then smashed the bottle on the side of the Warsong to be sure she had their attention.

“He’s _mine!_ ” she told them, and promptly staggered off the gangplank into a pile of trash.

What a shit day.

The scrappers started dragging off her score while she got to her feet.

“Wait!” she demanded, “He’s mine. So if you want him, you go through me.”

They considered her.

“But we’ve already got him,” one of them said. Probably the leader.

Wrong answer.

“Well, then I guess I go through you.”

“More food,” said one of them.

She laughed internally. At first glance, someone might mistake _her_ for Xandarian or Terran too. On another day, maybe she would have warned them off, but today… today had been a real shit day.

This, she thought as Warsong’s guns shredded them, was the life of a scrapper. One day, someone would do the same to her. Some days “one day” couldn’t come soon enough.

He actually thanked her as he got up, pulling the scrappers’ net off of him. It wasn’t the first time one of them had done that, but she hated it all the same. Sorry, kid — that just wasn’t how Sakaar _worked_.

She disked him, and activated the device to demonstrate, and he shuddered to the ground, filled with the pain of a thousand screaming squirrels. _That_ was how Sakaar worked.

He was too heavy for a Terran, she thought, as she dragged him aboard the Warsong. A wound in his shoulder had seeped red blood into his shirt, though, so not Xandarian either.

When she tossed him down into the cockpit, she noticed a bottle wedged underneath the pilot’s seat. Maybe today wasn’t such a shit day after all.

Once upon a time, she might have felt something unpleasant at the thought of selling an Asgardian to the Grandmaster, but all she thought now was that she was going to drink for a good long while off the fortune he would make her. Maybe she’d even buy Loki a drink for once, and she could see what kind of look it would put on that smug asshole’s face when she told him she’d earned it selling one of their own blood into the Contest to be pulled apart by the Hulk.

An Asgardian wouldn’t have any trouble in the arena. He might even give the Hulk a good challenge — her big green friend would like that.

She punched some buttons on the dash — _literally_ punched some of them; nothing worked the first time on this piece of junk ship (which she loved with all her drunken heart) — and said into the radio, “This is Scrapper 142. I need clearance and an audience with the boss. I’ve got something special.”

The Asgardian was yelling at her from below. She ignored him until she heard—

“I am Thor, son of Odin! I need to get back to Asgard!”

“Many apologies, your majesty,” she said, zapping him again to shut him up. She didn’t think he was _actually_ “Prince Thor” (any more than she thought the lying magpie living in the city was _actually_ “Prince Loki”) but to know the name at least meant that he was definitely Asgardian or Vanir (which was a meaningless distinction anyway.)

“You realize,” she said to blondie’s unconscious body, “If anyone _actually_ thought you were royalty, you’d be ransomed, not welcomed. You’re not in the Nine Realms any more.”

You couldn’t get much further from Asgard than Sakaar — not in distance or dogma.

 

*

 

This entire place, Thor determined, was insane. He was shackled to a hovering chair, following the lunatic who’d just bought him (bought him!!) from the scrapper as he flitted around a lavish party. This was apparently not a strange occurrence, as he drew no more than mild curiosity from some of the company.

The Grandmaster continued chattering inanely in Thor’s direction, but another sound cut through the din of the party to snag at Thor’s attention — the familiar cadence of a low, slick voice.

Thor’s stomach clenched. He looked around, and found him — a dark smudge on the riot of color that comprised the rest of the party.

“Loki,” Thor said.

His brother was relaxing on a couch, surrounded by party-goers. There was an easy smile on his face and a drink in his hand, he was clean and uninjured and dressed in new clothes. Thor thought he must be an illusion, but beside him a Krylorian woman laughed at whatever he was saying and leaned on his arm.

Maybe he was hallucinating, Thor thought.

He swallowed hard, then said again, louder, “Loki!”

Loki must have heard him that time, because he looked around. When he saw Thor, he froze. Then he was back, chatting with the people around him like nothing had happened.

“Loki!” Thor called him, anger starting to overwhelm the indescribable mess of feelings he’d had when he’d first heard his brother’s voice. He was strapped to a chair, damn it. This was no time to _mingle_.

Loki delicately extracted himself from the couch, smiling and chatting the whole while. Thor leaned toward him expectantly as he sidled away from the crowd, but instead of coming toward Thor, Loki slid through the party and out a door, leaving him alone.

Even as he erupted in a fit of cursing, some part of Thor couldn’t help but think he deserved it.

 

*

 

 _“Oy, Terran!”_ shouted a voice from somewhere over Tony’s head, accompanied the thunk-thunk of a fist hitting the metal wall, like she thought he might be taking a nap back here. “We’re hitting the Contest tonight! Korg of Krona’s fighting, and some new loser’s gonna get smashed by the Champion. You’re coming.” It wasn’t a question. With Gravda, it rarely was.

Tony lifted his face from the circuit board he’d been soldering wires to. He was squished cross-legged behind part of the main console in a little ship they were repairing.

“Grav, I just… I gotta know— what is your _obsession_ with Korg?” he asked the Hurctarian, reaching up to grab the edge of the console and heaving himself to his feet. The leg he’d been sitting on for the past hour was asleep, and he had to stand there and wait for the pins and needles to pass. He pointed. “Hey while you’re over there, hit that switch for me.”

She picked up the indicated switch, which was hanging off the console by an exposed wire, and flicked it. “You’ve seen him,” she said, “He’s sexy.” The portion of the console’s controls he’d been working on lit up successfully.

“He’s a _boulder_ ,” Tony reminded her.

“A sexy boulder,” she insisted.

“We’re gonna have to agree to disagree.” Tony huffed and angled his head toward the stream of cool air from a fan they had running in the back of the room. It was hot back there, beneath a half-ton of computer with only a soldering iron for company.

“He’s not gonna get smashed…” sang Krevan softly, from where he was carefully setting a new polished glass face onto the console’s main touchscreen.

“What, the new guy? He’s fighting the _Champion_ ,” said Gravda to the huge, muscled lizard-man. (Tony couldn’t remember what they were called.) “Everyone who fights the Champion gets smashed. It’s what he does.”

Krevan smirked.

She groaned. “You’re not betting on long shots again, are you, boss?”

He laughed. “Last one worked out pretty well, I think.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me,” Tony said to him, climbing over the console. “But you’re wrong, anyway. He’s gonna get smashed. Trust me.”

Krevan’s smirk spread into a toothy grin, the sharpness of which had stopped being unnerving to Tony somewhere around three days ago. “Ooh, first week off his homeworld and already he’s an expert.”

“Well, I _am_ a genius,” Tony said. “But also, the Jolly Green Giant’s kind of—”

“—An ‘old friend’, yeah, yeah,” Gravda finished for him. She kicked the back of Krevan’s chair — a little stool that looked rather like a rolling office chair with the back taken off it. “What do you know?”

“I know 142 brought him in yesterday and called him a contender.”

Gravda passed Tony a bottle of water as he sat on the edge of the console and wiped sweat from his eyes. “So?” she said, “What, you think all the good fighters gotta come out of her territory or somethin’?” Korg had not come out of 142’s territory. He’d been part of a batch of rebels delivered to Sakaar straight from Krona. Tony only knew any of this because Gravda was a loquacious fangirl and Krevan was an unrepentant snoop.

“142 would know, I guess,” said Tony. Scrapper 142 was gorgeous, deadly, and perpetually drunk. He’d tried to talk to her once, after he’d found out she was chummy with the Hulk. She’d thought he was hitting on her (he assumed) and thrown him out a window.

Krevan nodded at him. “Yeah, the new guy’s an Asgardian, like her.”

“Eh,” said Tony. “I’ve seen the Hulk beat up Asgardians.”

Krevan looked disappointed at that. “Maybe it was a small Asgardian.”

“Small Asgardian, big Asgardian,” said Tony. “To be fair, they both survived it, at least.”

“Well,” said Krevan, “Maybe the Lord of Thunder is tougher than the ones you met.”

“The what.”

Krevan shrugged, tinkering with a stuck button. “That’s his name. Or, that’s what the fight roster’s calling him. ‘Lord of Thunder.’”

“ _God_ of Thunder,” Tony said. “That son of a bitch.”

He grinned at the confused looks on their faces.

“Where are you goin’?” Krevan asked, as Tony hopped off the console and started to run off.

“Shit’s about to go down,” Tony said. “Time to dust off my suit.”

 

*

 

“Hey big guy!” crowed Scrapper 142 as she strutted into the Hulk’s room carrying two massive bottles of fine Stygian whiskey, "Guess who got paid?! Drinks are on— oh god _you’re_ here.

“Shut up,” said Loki. He was pacing back and forth across the room, and the Hulk was amusing himself by aiming a ball so it passed through Loki’s illusionary form as he bounced it off the wall.

Loki never came here in person. He could barely sit comfortably in the Grandmaster’s skybox at the stadium. The Hulk terrified him. The fact that he sought out the company of the Grandmaster’s Champion was frankly bewildering.

“Angry Girl!” The Hulk greeted her. “Good day?”

The scrapper handed the Hulk one of the bottles and pried the top off her own. “ _Great_ day,” she said, clinking her bottle against his and taking a swig.

“At least it is for _someone_ ,” Loki grumbled. He continued to pace.

“You know the Grandmaster’s havin’ a nice little party,” said the scrapper. “Shouldn’t you be there?” _Kissing ass_ , she didn’t say, though she hoped her smirk implied it. She was still trying to figure out how to properly weaponize the day’s events against him.

“I _was_ there,” Loki snarled at her. “Want to know what I saw?”

“I know what kinds of parties the Grandmaster throws. I’m sure I _don’t_ want to know what you saw.”

The Hulk laughed, and she grinned at him before taking another drink.

“My _brother_.”

She choked.

The Hulk made a curious sound. “Thor here?”

She almost choked again.

Loki stopped pacing and fidgeted. “Doubtless bound for the arena, so I’m sure you’ll see him soon. Stupid oaf got himself caught by a scrap—” he stopped abruptly.

Very slowly, he turned to look at her.

She started to laugh. It grew from a chuckle into something nearly hysterical. Everything about this was funny. (Some of it was funny because it was kind of horrible, but it was funny nonetheless.)

Oh, to anyone else the growing rage on Loki’s face must be a truly terrifying thing. But even if she hadn’t faced down horrors he couldn’t begin to compare to, she wouldn’t be afraid of him. She’d kicked his ass before and she could do it again.

“Okay, okay, hold on,” she said, “Let me get this straight: Blondie there was your brother?”

Loki looked like he might be having an aneurysm. The Hulk chugged his whiskey and said, “Thor Loki’s brother.”

“Yeah,” she said, “But he’s _actually_ Thor.”

“Eh?” said the Hulk.

“Thor,” she said. “Son of Odin. He didn’t _look_ anything like Odin.”

Hulk said, “Thor Odinson, yeah.” He shrugged.

She looked at Loki.

“What?” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm, “You didn’t believe me, _Valkyrie?_ ”

She ignored that. He’d prodded her with that title enough times that it had since lost its edge. “Well, shit,” she said. “What’d you do, piss off Odin? What — did he just aim the Bifrost into space and toss you both into it? How’d you end up in this shithole?” She’d never really cared to ask him before. She wasn’t sure she cared now.

“Please kindly fall into a hole and die.”

She grinned and took a swig from her bottle. Sometimes she thought they might get along if he wasn’t so dead-set on disliking her. “Make me.” Then she looked at the Hulk. “And you! How’d you meet a couple of princes, anyway?”

“Hulk beat them up.” He emptied his bottle. “Bored,” he said to her, “Come train?”

“There’s got to be a story there,” she said. She made a gesture for him to wait a moment and chugged the rest of the bottle down all at once.

Loki watched her with disgust. Watching expensive booze get treated like second-rate mead at a kegger was deeply offensive to him. That was the difference between them, she thought. Loki drank to have a good time — she was drinking to die. Sometimes she wondered if he was Asgardian at all.

“There is indeed a story there,” he said, finally, “But if you want to hear it, I suppose you must pry the words one at a time from the Hulk, because _I_ am not interested in telling it to you.”

“Tragic,” she said. “Good thing I don’t care.” _That_ was a lie. She _absolutely_ wanted to hear about the time the Hulk had beaten up Loki.

He disappeared with a huff, and she decided to kick his ass again the next time she saw him, just for good measure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey in response to some comments I just want to say: I highly doubt I'll be writing any ships here, but anyone who wants to use this fic as a jumping point to write something of their own is more than welcome. Pilfer and plunder any of my ideas as you see fit!
> 
> Also: if Tony never gets the chance to call Korg "Dwayne Johnson" I will literally cry. I just. I need people to know I'm thinking about it.


	16. 'Cause a Sakaarian Party Don't Stop

Tony didn’t frequent the Arena. Well, he hadn’t been on Sakaar long enough to frequent _anywhere_ , so maybe it was more accurate to say that he _actively avoided_ the Arena. Even when the participants weren’t human — even when they were so far from human that Tony’s brain had trouble registering them as people at all — blood sports were not exactly his idea of a good time.

Thankfully, scrappers like Krevan’s crew had to tailgate up in the nosebleeds, hovering above the stadium with a few dozen other ships, where Tony could barely see the arena and where there were much more interesting things to look at. He passed the time by pointing out scrapper ships to Krevan, who was more than happy to describe their origins and capabilities in exquisite detail.

The big lizard was describing the particular mechanics of the tractor beam on a Nova Core Star Blaster when Scrapper 142’s ship settled in nearby. “Main event must be starting soon,” Tony said.

“Warsong,” growled Gymir from where he lurked at the back of the hold. He was a wiry grey-blue humanoid, probably more than ten feet tall. He shuffled to the door to shout at her, “That ship’s too good for you, Asgardian!” She spared him a look and a rude gesture before directing her attention back to the fight.

“Does everybody around here hate each other?” Tony asked. There was a general din of affirmation. He sipped his drink as the massive holographic form of the Grandmaster appeared to harangue the crowd and let his gaze wander around the arena.

Krevan had started back up on the Star Blaster when Tony gave him a shove and pointed.

“That guy! In the skybox!” he said, “Who is that?” Tony knew exactly who it was, he was just mad he’d spent nearly a week looking for Loki only to find him right in plain sight in the last place he’d thought to look.

“In Sakaar,” said Krevan, “You’re a king or a pawn, right?”

Everything was games in Sakaar. The slaves and the gamblers alike lived and died by them.

“Right,” Tony said.

“Wrong,” said Krevan. “I’m a king and you’re a pawn, but we’re both still pieces on the game board. Those people there? The Grandmaster and his buddies? They’re the _players_.” He nodded sagely at Tony. “Never forget that. In any game, there’s always pieces and players.”

It didn’t really answer his question, but Tony could forgive him. He got philosophical when he was tipsy.

“Yeah, thanks, I’ll remember that,” Tony said. “But I meant like specifically. Not just in general.”

Krevan shrugged.

“Gamblers live the good life if they’re lucky,” said Gravda, “But they don’t exactly make names for themselves.” Her voice was hoarse from cheering.

“Another Asgardian,” said Gymir. “Too many of them on Sakaar these days.”

Beneath them, the Grandmaster was saying, “—Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the Lord of Thunder!”

Gravda squawked a protest as Tony snatched the binoculars from her and aimed them at the arena floor. “ _God_ of Thunder,” he muttered, training them on the contender as he strode out across the sand. It _was_ Thor — Tony was pretty sure of it, even though he only managed to glimpse the gladiator’s head for a moment before he clapped a helmet onto it. His hair was different, but it was him.

Tony saw him catch sight of Loki, who just stared impassively at him. Thor shouted something up at him, but the roar of the crowd and the Grandmaster’s rambling drowned him out.

“Ladies and gentlemen… I give you… your incredible—”

The Hulk exploded out of the door, roaring, _“Hulk!”_ The crowd cheered, screaming his name.

“Aw, Bruce,” Tony sighed. He’d always thought the Hulk needed to get out more, but there could be too much of a good thing.

Thor’s elated reaction cut through the shouts and momentarily silenced the crowd.

Tony glanced over at Loki and found the Grandmaster had joined him. They sat on the couch, close enough to lean in and whisper conspiratorially to one another. Tony found that he was not in the least bit surprised.

Thor chattered joyfully at the Hulk — how surprised he was to see him, how they’d thought he might be dead — and then, Tony heard, distinctly—

“Banner, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m happy to see you.”

Tony winced. “Oh no.”

The crowd was chanting: _“Hulk! Hulk! Hulk!”_

“Banner!” Thor called, “Hey, Banner!”

“No no no, you _idiot_ , don’t mention puny Banner—” In the skybox, Loki was massaging his temples as the Grandmaster rubbed his hands together.

“No Banner! Only Hulk!”

“Well, Krev,” said Tony, “I hope you didn’t bet more than you can afford to lose.”

“Eh, I never do.”

Tony was more than well-acquainted with the sort of destruction caused by Thor and the Hulk sparring, but this was pretty brutal even for them. Even Loki had to wince at some of the blows. If anyone had a reason to be sympathetic…

Tony nudged Krevan. “Hey, so, if I wanted to get into one of the Grandmaster’s parties — what?”

The whole crew stared at him like he’d started speaking in tongues.

And then a crack of thunder interrupted them. They looked back down to see the Hulk had been thrown across the arena floor and Thor was wreathed in shining pops of electricity.

“Holy shit,” said Tony. Could he do that without Mjolnir? Well. Apparently so.

Loki inched forward in his seat, looking as surprised as Thor himself seemed to be. Beside him, the Grandmaster’s look of disappointed confusion was turning slowly to rage.

Thor and the Hulk returned to trading blows, and now the lightning was giving Thor an obvious edge. The crowd was shouting: “Thunder! Thunder! Thunder!”

And then he was down. Tony didn’t see how it happened, but Thor was on the ground, and the Hulk leapt high into the air and came down on top of him like a bomb.

It was over.

Krevan sighed, and Gymir cheered, and Gravda said, “Hell of a fight.”

The Hulk took in the cheers of the crowd, grinning from ear to ear. When a couple of handlers came out to take Thor, the Hulk snarled at them, picked the Asgardian up, and carried him off.

“So,” said Krevan, “You want to get into one of the Grandmaster’s parties.”

He grinned.

 

*

 

“What is the _matter_ with you?!”

The words cut through the fog of unconsciousness to strike right at Thor’s core. He managed to grumble out something that sounded vaguely defensive before he realized the voice was not talking to him.

Loki’s voice. Definitely.

Thor blinked his eyes open and looked around.

“You were not supposed to _steal_ him,” he was saying. “That was not the plan!”

There had been a plan? The Hulk walked over to select a bottle of booze from a shelf. Loki was following him around, looking for all the world like a tiny irate bird.

“No plan. Hulk do what Hulk want.”

Loki made a sound of wordless frustration and the Hulk laughed at him.

It was almost — _almost_ — friendly. No, actually — this was Loki. This was about as friendly as Loki got.

Were they _friends?_

“You are ruining everything,” Loki huffed.

The Hulk grunted and looked contrite. “Okay, okay. Hulk sorry.”

Loki looked immediately suspicious. “Sorry,” he said, doubtful.

“Yeah. Hulk sorry,” He turned to fully face Loki and nodded. “Hulk fix,” he said.

“Fix… how?”

“Hulk give Thor to Loki,” the Hulk said.

Loki narrowed his eyes at him. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch,” said Hulk. “Loki take Thor. No problem.”

There was a long stretch of silence before Loki said finally, “Oh. Well. Thank you.”

The Hulk nodded. “No problem.” His mouth twitched, unable to contain a grin. “You come get.”

Loki stiffened. “You—!” His face got very red, and the Hulk started to laugh uproariously. Loki made a gesture like he wanted to wrap his hands around the giant’s neck and throttle him.

The Hulk pulled off his armor and heaved it at Loki. He didn’t flinch, and the illusion flickered back into place momentarily.

“Go home, puny god,” Hulk said. “Stop bothering Hulk. Hot tub time.”

Loki huffed. “No need for me now that you’ve kidnapped yourself a real friend, hm?”

 _“Hulk have plenty friends!”_ the Hulk roared, flinging his helmet at Loki. It hit the illusion and dispersed it, and this time it didn’t reappear.

The Hulk threw his clothes off — and _that_ was an image that was going to be burned forever in Thor’s mind — and splashed into a hot tub on the side of the room to relax.

“Hulk have plenty friends,” Thor heard him grumble. “Everybody love Hulk here.”

Thor sat up slowly, groaning, and tried to take everything in. He nodded at the Hulk and said, “Are we cool?”

The Hulk grunted in response.

Thor waved his hand in the direction of the pile of armor. “So you’re friends with Loki now?” he asked.

“Loki not friend,” the Hulk growled. “He scared of Hulk.”

“Well, to be fair, you did smash him.”

The Hulk chuckled. “Yeah. Hulk smash him good. Smash you good too.”

“You cheated,” Thor said.

“Hulk not cheat.”

“Well, _somebody_ cheated.” Probably the Grandmaster. Thor wondered if Loki had won or lost the wager he’d doubtlessly made on the fight.

“Have you seen Tony?” Thor asked him. “Or has Loki?”

“Tony here too?” the Hulk said, “Why? Everybody looking for Hulk?”

Thor sighed. “It’s a long story.”

The Hulk popped the lid on his bottle and took a long drink. “Hulk have time.”

“Well _I_ don’t!” Thor said, “I have to get back to Earth before my sister _destroys it!_ ”

“Thor have time,” said the Hulk. “Nothing but time on Sakaar. Years and years go, still have time.”

“Wha?” Thor shook his head. “What do you mean ‘years and years’? You only disappeared two years ago.”

“Years and years,” said the Hulk.

The Grandmaster had mentioned something too — about time passing strangely in Sakaar.

“So time passes faster here?” Thor asked. He didn’t really expect the Hulk to be able to give him details, and the Hulk shrugged.

If that was the case, how long had Loki been here? Clearly longer than Thor — he was close to the Grandmaster, he’d befriended (sort of) the Hulk. Thor wondered uneasily how long he’d waited for a rescue that had never come. Did he think they’d just abandoned him?

And Tony. Thor had seen no sign of him among the gladiators, and neither had the Hulk. He could have been caught and killed before Thor had even arrived. What had the scrappers said to him when they’d tried to capture him?

_Are you a fighter or are you food?_

Thor told himself to calm down. _Loki_ was neither fighter nor food, so clearly those weren’t the only options.

He had to get moving. He’d feel better once he had something to do. Thor forced himself to his feet and found he could barely stand. Everything hurt. _Everything_.

“I won that fight,” he wheezed. “Just so you know.”

The Hulk gave him a look that clearly said _sure you did_.

 

*

 

“You know,” said Gravda, “You clean up pretty good.”

“I do know that,” Tony said. He straightened his new jacket and reminded himself how lucky he was that “approximately human-shaped” was the most common cut for clothes in this part of the universe. It wasn’t Armani, but it either matched or hid the pieces of the Iron Man suit he was wearing. He was lucky that cybernetic enhancements were a common sight around here, too — the armor didn’t draw undue attention. “Where’s a sorcerer who can pull fancy clothes out of nowhere when you need him? Oh, wait.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t care,” Gravda said. She’d bought herself a sleek electric blue dress that matched the lipstick she saved for special occasions.

“You know,” he said to her, “You clean up pretty good too.”

“Don’t get fresh, shorty,” she said, but she was grinning.

They rounded the corner into the bar and into a sea of people.

“So, uh, how much money did you say you made off that fight last night?” he asked her conversationally.

“Enough for a couple of drinks,” she said, as he steered her toward the bar. She skimmed the menu. “One drink,” she amended.

Tony snorted. “Oh come on. You’re a hot girl, you don’t buy your own drinks. You get drunk idiots like me to buy them for you.”

Gravda laughed. She nodded at the end of the bar, where Loki was talking animatedly with one of the bartenders over a narrow champagne glass of something bright red. “That your Asgardian?”

“Yep.”

“All right,” she said, “Good luck. Don’t get thrown out another window.”

Tony really hoped that wasn’t a possibility, but honestly, with Loki, he was never entirely sure. He slid up as the bartender walked off to deal with another patron and leaned against the bar.

“Come here often?”

Loki nearly inhaled his drink. “Stark,” he croaked, when he was finished coughing, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Tragic tale,” Tony said. “Buddy of mine fell into a hole in space, so — against my better judgement — I uh. You know. Fell in after him.”

“I see,” Loki said. He made a gesture to the bartender, who brought him another drink, which he slid toward Tony. Tony supposed this meant he was not going to be thrown out of a window, and took it with a word of thanks.

“You’ve seen Thor, then?” Loki said as much as asked.

“Yeah. Well. I saw the fight last night, anyway. _He_ hasn’t seen _me_.”

Loki had gone strangely quiet. Tony knew him just barely well enough to recognize that he was In A Mood. Maybe getting thrown out a window _wasn’t_ off the table yet. Tony took a cautious sip of his drink — he had learned quickly that not everything here was safe for human consumption — it had a very herbal taste and felt hot on the back of his throat in a way that was not entirely pleasant.

And then, all at once, Loki was cheerful again, smile bright and eyes sharp. “So how do you find Sakaar?” he asked. Steering the conversation away from something dangerous. Tony wasn’t stupid enough to start gabbing about plans to spring their captured friends in public, but he couldn’t fault Loki for not knowing that.

“Honestly, if circumstances were a little different, I’d be having the time of my life,” Tony said, as he moved to make room for a Kree woman trying to get the attention of the bartender. “What I wouldn’t give to take home one of these ships. The tech is— well. You know. Space is incredible.”

Loki chuckled. “I imagine so.”

“Is Asgard like this?” Tony asked him. He had never been curious about Asgard before. Despite all knowledge to the contrary, he’d never been able to shake the idea that Thor was just basically a magical viking. Everything he knew about Asgard sounded medieval fantasy, not sci-fi.

Loki looked disgusted. “ _Certainly not_. Asgard is beautiful.” His voice dipped in volume as he said, “This place is a scrap heap.”

“I meant… you know, the aliens, the ships, the… the technology,” Tony said. “Thor always talked about magic, not so much science.”

“We don’t treat them as separate things in Asgard. Technology runs on magic, magic is aided by technology. Magic _is_ a science.” Loki made a face like he was trying to recall something, “Harnessing dimensional energy to alter the ‘source code’ of reality. That’s how Strange described it. You mortals are so _crude_.” He knocked back the rest of his drink.

“Are you telling me that Thor’s been talking tech at me for years and it all just went right over my head?” Tony didn’t know how to feel about that. Probably annoyed that the All-Speak didn’t do as good a job parsing technical terminology as the universal translator Krevan had fitted him with. ( _That_ had been a terrifying experience.)

“Probably,” said Loki, taking the drink Tony was ignoring out of his hand and finishing that, too.

“Thank you for that knowledge,” said Tony. “I hate it.”

“Oh no,” said Loki. He forced a smile and said through his teeth, “Please don’t say anything stupid.”

It was all he had time to say before they were overwhelmed by the sparkly peacock-blue presence of the Grandmaster.


	17. Flirting With Disasters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy crap it's Thursday. It's spring break and my buddy is off work so my schedule's a little borked.
> 
> Thanks for your patience! I had to cut a whole chapter earlier because I didn't like how it messed with the pacing so I fell a bit behind. This chapter is like 1000 words longer than usual as a result, haha!

“So, uh, what do we have here? This is a new face, isn’t it?” The Grandmaster leaned in to take a drink from the bartender, and looked Tony over.

Loki’s ability to spin a believable falsehood was somewhat compromised by the heavy buzz of alcohol in his system. He hadn’t prepared to defend party crashers from the wrath of the Grandmaster. He’d planned on drinking himself stupid and going to bed (of which he had only so far managed the first part.)

He still hadn’t spun the nebulous cloud of possibilities into a proper thread when Tony started talking. Loki gestured to the bartender for another drink. If he was going to die, he would at least be too drunk to worry about it.

“Tony Stark,” Tony said. He raised his hand to offer it to the Grandmaster, and played it off as a gesture when he didn’t take it. “I know we’ve never met, but I’ve just got to say — wow. I’m such a _huge fan_ of your parties, and your Hulk.”

The Grandmaster’s face lit up, any trace of suspicion momentarily set aside in the face of an opportunity to talk about his precious Champion. “He’s just wonderful, isn’t he? He’s won every single fight since he got here.”

“Oh, tell me about it. My buddy lost a bet on the new guy last night. I told him not to do it. Nobody beats the Champ.” The bartender brought two more of the cocktail Loki had been drinking and Tony accepted one with a frankly patronizing, “Thanks, dear.”

“Scrapper 142 brought him to me. She brings me the _best_ stuff. Topaz, don’t I always say—”

Tony snapped his fingers, “142 — gorgeous Asgardian, right? Muscles, facial… paint stuff, mean right hook? She’s fantastic. Threw me out a window once, it was _amazing_.”

They traded conversation back and forth, rapid as machine gun fire. Loki felt his eyes glazing over and forced himself to blink. Behind the Grandmaster, Topaz had much the same look. He would have offered her a drink if he wasn’t certain she’d murder him.

Murder would have to come later. Loki had things to do tonight. Well. Tomorrow, once he sobered up.

“—awful quiet tonight, aren’t you? Lost in thought?”

Loki was really glad he’d managed to catch the end of that in time to realize the Grandmaster was looking at him. “Not at all, my friend. I just didn’t want to interrupt. You two seemed to be having such a good time.”

“Oh we are, we are. Great time. Speaking of interrupting, I’m uh, I’m not interrupting anything here…?” the Grandmaster gestured between Tony and Loki.

“Well,” said Loki, “I didn’t want to say anything.”

The Grandmaster patted him on the shoulder. “You see,” he said, “That’s your problem. You’re just too polite. It’s that, uh, that _royal upbringing_ , right?” Topaz rolled her eyes so hard they looked like they might get stuck. Tony snorted into his drink.

“All right, all right. I can take a hint. I’ll skedaddle. You two crazy kids have some fun,” the Grandmaster aimed an unsubtle attempt at a wink at them and slid away to bother another guest.

Loki put his arm around Tony’s shoulders to pull him away from the bar and he responded by wrapping his arm around Loki’s waist.

“Are you drunk?” Loki asked him.

“Uh. No?” said Tony, looking confused, “You?”

“Very.”

“…I’m going to pay for invading your personal space later, aren’t I?”

“What makes you think I’ll wait until later?” Loki said dryly.

“Wishful thinking?”

A laugh slipped out before Loki managed to clap his hand over his mouth. Tony snickered.

“Wow,” he said, “You _are_ drunk.”

He moved his hand to a more gentlemanly spot on the back of Loki’s shoulder and Loki slowly released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. It wasn’t that he was averse to a little flirting — fake or otherwise — but he knew he was drunk enough to make an ass of himself if he was given the opportunity. Making an ass of himself in front of Sakaar’s elite was one thing — drunken embarassment was a fact of life here — but if he embarrassed himself in front of Thor’s stupid Earth friends, he would _die_.

“What the hell was _that_ , by the way?” Loki asked, gesturing ineffectively back at the bar.

“What, the part where I didn’t get myself murdered for showing up uninvited to a crazy dictator’s post-deathfest shindig?”

“Precisely that.”

“I know you might not know this about me, what with you being mostly too busy trying to kill me instead of getting to know me properly — which is hurtful, by the way, just so you know — but I am actually very rich and irresponsible.”

With as much eloquence as he could muster under the circumstances, Loki said, “What?”

“This is not my first time crashing a fancy party.”

Loki steered them through a hallway and into a quiet corner by a window. He dropped a spell of subtle obfuscation around them to prevent eavesdropping.

“Getting into one of these parties to find _you_ was sort of the extent of my plan,” Tony admitted. “What do we do about Thor and Bruce?”

“Who?” Loki said, inexplicably taken by the urge to feign ignorance.

“Bruce Banner,” Tony said, sounding unconvinced. “The Hulk?”

Loki made a noncommittal sound. “Retrieving Thor would have been easier if that idiot hadn’t _walked off with him_.” He rubbed his temples.

Tony nodded. “The Hulk’s got more security than the rest of the fighters, huh?”

“What? No,” said Loki. “I tried to win him in a wager but the Grandmaster wouldn’t deny his beloved Champion a new pet.”

That made Tony chuckle. It _was_ funny, but Loki didn’t laugh. He should have felt relieved to finally have a co-conspirator, a cause. Something to work toward rather than the endless machinating of Sakaar.

There was no balance here, but Loki felt an imbalance anyway. An upset to his life, a derailing of his plans. (Did he have plans? Not really. He’d mostly just resigned himself to Sakaar’s mad scrabble for transitory power and attention until the drinking or the Grandmaster killed him.)

“There’s a hundred wormholes out there,” Tony was saying. “One of them has to come out somewhere close to Earth. I don’t know how to find out which one, though — or how we even get through if we find it. They’re not one-way, I’ve seen transport ships go out through them.”

He was trying to prompt Loki for answers. “I know how wormholes work,” was all he said.

The question passed unspoken between them: why had Loki never tried to leave? It was good the mortal didn’t ask, because Loki would not have had an answer for him.

Tony cleared his throat. “Are you okay?” he asked. Casual. “You seem—”

Loki’s lips pulled into a razor-sharp slice of a smile, and he spread his hands, “Drunk?”

“—upset.”

“Perhaps I feel a bit put-upon,” Loki said. “I had other plans for tonight.”

“Yeah, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt your bender,” Tony said. “I assume we’re gonna need a ship.”

“You assume a lot,” Loki said. Tony looked confused and Loki regarded him through narrowed eyes. “You _assume_ I want to leave, I think. Give me one reason not to simply reveal all your plans to the Grandmaster. I’m sure I’d be handsomely rewarded — he is _desperately_ fond of his Champion.”

It took a second for what he’d said to sink in. Loki watched the emotions play across Tony’s face with satisfaction. _There you go_ , he thought. _Now you see me._

“You—” Tony stammered — disbelieving, angry, “You’re gonna stand there and tell me you’d rather rot here on this _scrap heap_ — your words, not mine — than go home?”

“What home is that?” Loki asked him. “Fair Asgard, where I am either a traitor to be locked away and never looked at or a knife in my brother’s boot, to be pulled out and used when he’s been stripped of any other options? Or do you mean to take me home with _you_ , as my father did before you? A piteous foundling, to treat kindly in the hopes that when I bite — as all wild beasts must, eventually — it will be at your enemies and not yourself?”

 _And would that be so terrible?_ The thought sprang, unwelcome, to Loki’s mind, and he shoved it away. He remembered the anger he’d been consumed by all those years ago and tried to dredge it back up, but the well was emptied now. Drained at some point between the the last time his mother had told him she loved him and the first time he’d heard it from his father.

“Okay,” said Tony, quietly. He nodded. “Okay. You don’t owe me anything, I’m not going to try to convince you to go somewhere you don’t want to be.” There was no pity in his voice for Loki to hate. Damn him. “But I know you don’t want this for your brother, and I’m not leaving my friends behind. Help me get them out of here.”

Loki took a deep breath. “I will help you get Thor,” he said.

Tony gave a frustrated sigh. “But not Bruce.”

“Your green friend has been Champion here for decades,” Loki said. “Bruce Banner is gone.”

“Yeah, well, Earth is the Hulk’s home, too. I know how you feel about him, but—”

“You have _no idea_ how I feel about him,” Loki growled. (If Loki was being honest — and sometimes he was — he wasn’t that sure himself.)

“Wait—” Tony said, he looked like he was doing some mental arithmetic. “What do you mean _decades?_ He hasn’t been gone that long.”

“Haven’t encountered the effects of Sakaar’s time dilation yet?” Loki asked with a sigh, “No more time actually passes here than in the rest of the universe, but the bizarre effects of the wormholes stretch minutes out into days upon days. Probably mostly the fault of the big one — it’s got a dying star in it or something.”

“So… I’ve been here just under a week, and on Earth it’s been…?”

Loki shook his head. He was far too drunk for math. “I don’t know, honestly. Minutes? Hours, maybe?”

Tony was shaking his head. “That can’t be right.” He looked up at Loki with an alarmed expression, and said, “How long have you been here?”

Loki shrugged. “Not that long. Sakaar doesn’t count time the same way we do. By the reckoning of the Nine Realms, perhaps six months.”

Tony stared at him. “You’ve been here _half a year?_ ”

“I suppose that’s a long time for a mortal,” Loki said, shrugging again. How long did they live? He couldn’t remember.

“Jesus Christ,” said Tony. He leaned against the wall and ran a hand through his hair, talking more to himself than Loki now. “It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. I had to— I had to call Pepper, in case— god, at least she hasn’t been sitting around for a week thinking I’m dead in space—”

“What _are_ you babbling about?” He was too drunk for this, Loki told himself again.

Tony shook his head, held up his hands as if to push the overwhelming slew of thoughts away, “Okay one thing at a time.” He looked at Loki and said, “I’m not leaving my friends here. I’m not going to try to get you to leave if you’re _happy_ here—” he sounded doubtful, which Loki did not appreciate, “—but there’s no way I’m going anywhere without Thor or Bruce.”

“Then don’t go anywhere,” said Loki. He’d meant for it to sound spiteful but instead it came out sounding pathetic. He turned away to look out the window and hoped it looked casual. He shrugged. “What did you say earlier — that if circumstances were different, you could be having the time of your life here? Stay. See what you can learn. You’ll never have another opportunity like this in _your_ lifetime.”

Loki glanced askance at Tony and could see him considering the possibilities. Loki respected that. It was one thing to _decide_ to do something unpleasant, but Loki disliked the idea that being “good” (or “heroic” or whatever stupid thing people were _supposed_ to be) meant that one should never entertain any other option than “doing the right thing.”

Tony was sympathetic, but Loki wasn’t sure if it was enough to use or not. He briefly considered pushing their mock-flirtatious rapport towards something more serious but decided it was too much of a gamble without more understanding of the man’s preferences.

Straight to the coup de grace, then. Loki said, “If minutes there are months here, you have plenty of time. I don’t know if we’re strong enough to beat Hela, but having time to prepare can’t hurt.”

The mortal’s eyes flashed up to look at him, narrowed suspiciously. The corner of his mouth twitched. Loki went back over his words to make sure he hadn’t given anything away. (Did he have something to give away?) Had he seen something Loki hadn’t meant him to — or worse, something Loki himself hadn’t seen?

He was much too drunk for this, Loki reminded himself again. These humans could be unbearably canny.

Tony nodded. “Minutes to months, huh?”

“Go ask the Grandmaster if you can’t believe me,” Loki said with a shrug. He didn’t need to lie. He was perfectly capable of twisting the truth to suit his needs.

He nodded again. “Look,” Tony said, “Sleep it off. I’ll…” he frowned and ran his hand thoughtfully over his neatly-trimmed little beard. “I’ve still got to get in to see Thor, at least. I thought he must have been here all this time but if there’s time bullshit going on, he must have just gotten in. I’ve gotta make sure he knows what’s going on. I’ll try to talk to one of the scrappers who knows the Hulk.” He didn’t look pleased at the idea.

Loki snickered. “142? Just don’t tell her you’re a friend of mine, it won’t buy you any favor with her.”

“Friend of yours?” Tony asked, mildly sarcastic.

“You know how it goes. I learned her deepest, darkest secret. She punched me in the face. _Friends_.”

Tony chuckled and shook his head. “You’re crazy.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

He left after that, making his way back toward the party. Loki worked blearily back through the conversation and tried to squeeze anything he’d missed from it.

 

*

 

Overall, not the worst it could have gone, Tony decided. He managed to find Gravda without running face-first into the Grandmaster. She was sitting at the bar with an attractive Luphomoid who was trying admirably to flirt with her while she extolled the virtues of her favorite lithic warrior.

“Beat it, Terran,” the blue-and-purple woman snarled quietly at him as he walked up to them.

“Tonyyyyy!” Gravda finger-gunned at him as he walked up. “Hey, hold on I’ll be right back—” she hopped off her seat to pull him aside. “Look, look — I’ll meet you back at the ship, ey? I think I’ve got a date. I’ve been talking about Korg for like an hour and she’s still buying me drinks so I think we might be soul mates.”

Tony snickered. “She’s pretty. What’s her name?”

“Kyorii,” Gravda sang. “How’d it go with your Asgardian? You looked like you were gettin’ pretty friendly.” She nudged him and waggled her eyebrows.

“Well,” Tony said, “He didn’t throw me out a window.”

She laughed.

“Just a real quick question before I let you get back to your date…” He looked at the Luphomoid and found her glaring at him around her curtain of ink-black hair. “Is time, like… weird here on Sakaar?”

“Aw man, yeah,” Gravda said. “Didn’t you know? I’d be like a hundred years old if I lived anywhere else.”

“I don’t think I’m really following that,” Tony admitted.

She gave it a thought and said, “Okay, so like, on Sakaar it’s been like a hundred years or something right? But it’s actually only been like five years. But I’m not a super-old lady, because it’s only _really_ been like five years. Got it? It comes and goes, though. Like we can’t really schedule offworld transport right now because we’re at like a high point, but in a few decades it’ll slow to something more reasonable.”

“Narnia time,” Tony mumbled. “Thanks, Grav.”

“Yep,” she said.

He let her return to her date.

Tony hadn’t really thought Loki was lying about that part, but it put his mind at ease to confirm it. No wonder, then. Aside from the time it had taken to acclimate to the idea of being on an alien planet and the work he’d taken on from Krevan, Tony had spent his entire six days on Sakaar trying to figure out how to get his friends and get home. He’d never imagined the others hadn’t been doing the same. He’d _definitely_ never imagined that they might have done that, waited too long, given up, and started making a life here.

It was kind of depressing, when he thought of it like that.

Tony’s mouth quirked into a grin. But when Loki had talked about going back to Earth, he’d said “we” — _I don’t know if we’re strong enough to beat Hela_. Tony didn’t believe that he meant to stay on this _scrap heap_. Not when his _beautiful_ Asgard was still out there.

 

*

 

Loki had walked almost all the way back to his apartment when he realized.

 _“A buddy of mine fell into a hole in space,”_ Tony had said. _“Against my better judgment, I fell in after him.”_

Except that Tony had been here almost a week, and Thor had showed up only now.

Which meant that the person that stupid mortal had gone after had been _him_.

The Valkyrie — that was all he could think of her as, now that he knew it about her — was waiting for him when he got home. She was lounging on the stairs before his hallway, with two bottles (one half empty) and a smug expression that melted into something close to concern when she saw his face.

He wanted to scream. Something hot rushed in his veins, like panic, like _rage_. That _useless_ sentiment — he could bear it (grudgingly) from Thor and his idiot friends, but not from her. She should have known better.

He called up a knife and flung it at her, and she lunged at him.

 

*

 

A brief, violent scuffle later and the scrapper dragged Loki into his apartment, feeling like a pincushion but otherwise satisfied. He tottered over to the couch and stood staring at it for a second before he slowly crumpled onto it.

“Poor baby,” she said pitilessly.

He just whined miserably in response.

She sprawled next to him and emptied one of the bottles. “I bought you a drink,” she said, “But then I drank it.”

“I think you cracked a rib,” he practically sobbed.

“You’re welcome,” she said, working one of his little knives out of her own ribs as carefully as she could. A hair too deep and it might have nicked something important.

She would never admit it, but his aim — even drunk and in the middle of a temper tantrum — was truly impressive.

 _How far your guard has fallen, Valkyrie._ She could practically hear his oil-slick voice. She was fluent in the language of sharp blades and stab wounds.

 _I could have killed you_ , said the dagger just above her elbow, just shy of an artery.

 _If I wanted you to be dead, I could make you dead_ , said the one in her thigh, similarly near to lethal.

 _I don’t want you to be dead_ , said the deep slice on her neck, uncomfortably close to her jugular.

She wondered what life a spoiled little prince could have possibly lived that such an affectionate message had to be conveyed with the points of knives. She would never ask. That wasn’t the sort of pain they shared.

He made a sound that probably meant he was crying. She didn’t tell him to stop whining. If he didn’t want to hurt, he could heal himself, she hadn’t done anything that could prevent that. That was the line they didn’t cross — they could beat one another to ruin but she never touched his hands or his mouth and when they were done, if they needed it, he would coax the wounds closed with his magic.

It was the only gentleness there was in him.

She knifed the top off the other bottle and drank. Eventually he unfolded himself and sat up, hissing with pain.

“I hate you,” he lied, gesturing for the drink. She handed it to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, Fight Club is not a healthy coping mechanism.
> 
> Poor Thor is being neglected. We'll fix that soon, I promise. I haven't forgotten.


	18. Pretty Lies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: In case you didn't catch the update to the tags, this and subsequent chapters may feature scenes of self-harm.

_“What is Loki god of?” Odin asked him._

_“Tricks,” Loki lied._

 

Loki woke in the morning from nightmares he couldn’t remember and found himself in his bed. He was alone, thank whatever gods that gods may pray to. He keenly recalled drunkenly flirting with Stark the night before and if he’d woken to find the man (or worse, the Valkyrie, whose presence was evidenced as much by his bruised and aching body as by his memory) in bed with him—

Actually, he wasn’t sure. A messy prospect, certainly, and one he didn’t have to deal with, so it bore no more thought.

Well. Perhaps a _little_ more thought. Later. When he wasn’t too hung-over to enjoy either idea. Or both.

He wanted to go back to sleep, but the world conspired to make it hard for him. There was far too much light, and his pillows had disappeared, and all the blankets were tangled around his knees so that no matter how he tugged them, some part of him was left uncovered. And his head felt like his brain was trying to escape his skull via his eye sockets.

Loki categorized the world into two kinds of pain — kinds that were satisfying and kinds that were not. Headaches were the latter. The only thing satisfying about a headache was the relief once one was gone.

(Except sometimes there were memories of the migraines Loki brought on himself through days of hyper-focused study when he’d forgotten to eat and drink. Memories of lying in a darkened room with a cold cloth pressed to the base of his skull while his brother’s hand worked at the stiff muscles in his neck. The low rumble of Thor’s voice as he talked about whatever Loki had missed out on while he’d been holed up by himself.)

Loki had to get up, then. If he shut his eyes and pressed his face into the mattress, he could remember, and the memories brought another unsatisfying sort of pain.

He found the Valkyrie sprawled, snoring, on the couch when he entered his living-room. He went back and retrieved a blanket, and threw it over her. He fetched himself a tall glass of water and a potion from the cramped corner of the room that served as a kitchen and chugged them both.

Loki staggered around the apartment on autopilot, brain working entirely separately from body, and thought about lies.

There was a monster in Loki’s heart, and for as long as he could remember, he had been hiding from it.

Loki told himself that it was only _fear_ : unjustified and unfounded. It was _not_ the truth.

That was the first lie.

Quietly, he had piled them up, lie after lie, like stones. Walls around his monster, so he wouldn’t have to look at it. And when it found cracks through which to slip and claw at him, he had built those walls out further, and further, and further still.

After he’d washed up, Loki took in the state of himself in the bathroom mirror, half dressed, with the bruises the Valkyrie had left on his torso clearly visible. He didn’t need to cover them up with anything but clothes, he decided. His hands and his face — the only parts of himself that his clothing displayed anyway — were unmarred, and he had no intention of healing the wounds just yet. His hand brushed the dark bruise on his ribs where she’d hit him hardest, searching the tender flesh for the place where — _ah, there_ — where bone had cracked.

Lie after lie, like bricks, until he’d built them into a grand labyrinth — until his monster was lost in it, and so was he.

He had lived in those lies until they’d felt like home. Until he didn’t know anymore what was a lie and what was true. Until he’d forgotten the monster that was hunting him down.

And then one day it had found him in Odin’s vault and savaged him and left him there to bleed.

 _I am a son of Odin and no matter how I am mocked and ignored, Asgard is my home and I belong here._ This lie, the foundation of his very being, had been ripped away along with the mask that he’d thought was his face.

If that could be a lie, then what else? His father’s love, his promises? His mother’s love? Thor’s?

And so he had tested these things the way he always had — by throwing himself against them and seeing what would break first.

Loki ran his fingers over the spot where the pain was at its apex. Gently, at first, so he knew precisely where it was.

His father’s promises — and his love — had shown themselves as lies with heartbreaking ease. Frigga’s love had held fast even as he felt his resolve begin to crumble. And maybe that was worse, because if his mother’s love had been real then maybe he could hope his brother’s was, as well.

Loki knew. He felt it. Every time he threw the ugly truth of his wicked self against the pretty lie of his brother’s love, he felt that lie crack just a little more.

He curled his fingers inward, until the pain was blinding, until he could think of nothing else. Until his grip weakened, fingers trembling, his body wisely respecting limits that his brain refused to acknowledge. _Satisfying_.

Today would be different, Loki knew.

Today was the day Thor would break.

 

*

 

Loki heard a soft thud as the Valkyrie rolled off the couch, followed by, “Oh shit, my stab wounds.” He smiled.

“Good morning,” he told her brightly. He could afford to be smug. _His_ hangover was gone.

She sat up on the floor and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I need a drink,” she mumbled. Too bad for her. They’d already drunk everything last night. Then, “Did you cover me with a blanket?”

He had, face and all. “I didn’t want to have to look at you while I ate breakfast,” he said acidly.

Loki didn’t cook, so the only thing he kept in his kitchen was tea (Strange had turned him onto it; it was far less disgusting than coffee) and the ingredients he’d hunted down for a few potions. The only food he could find was a box of barely-picked-at chocolates someone had given him as a gift. They were poisoned.

“The food on this planet is awful,” complained the Valkyrie, sorting through a stack of take-out menus. (That was a custom Loki liked about Midgard that he’d been pleased to find on Sakaar.) “Only thing I miss about home.”

“Ah, yes. Asgardian cuisine. Spit-roasted haunch of _something_.” Loki sighed. “I miss Midgard’s food. So much variety.” He missed Thor’s cooking, too — as much because it was amusing as because it was good. Suddenly he wasn’t hungry.

The Valkyrie raised an eyebrow. “You spent time on _Midgard?_ ”

“Mm.” Loki wished she wasn’t there so he could abandon all his plans and crawl back into bed. When he glanced back at her, she had a funny look on her face. Thoughtful, maybe. It made him suspicious. “Are you going training with the Hulk today?” he asked her.

“That’s the plan,” she said.

He took a deep breath and let it out again.

“Good,” he said. “I’m going with you.”

It was worth it, honestly, just for the look on her face.

 

*

 

“No, but, see,” Thor was saying gesturing out the window, “If we can get to the Quinjet, we can get out of here! You can go home! To Earth!” He smiled.

“Hulk stay,” the Hulk said again. He was strapping on his armor. Thor wondered what poor soul he was going to beat the shit out of this time.

“Come on,” Thor said. “You don’t really want to stay here.”

The Hulk just scowled at him. Thor sat on the window sill and put his head in his hands. He’d talked circles around this for hours. Nothing tempted the Hulk. Not his home, not his friends, not even food.

“Earth hate Hulk,” said the Hulk suddenly. He sat on the foot of his bed, polishing his helmet.

Thor winced. “They don’t hate you,” he said. “They’re just afraid.”

The Hulk scoffed. “Same.”

“Then you could come back to Asgard with me,” Thor offered. “You’d love it. It’s—”

“Hulk know about Asgard,” the Hulk said. “Shiny gold.”

“Yeah,” said Thor. He paused. “Loki told you about Asgard?”

“Showed Hulk,” the Hulk said, slapping his helmet on and standing up. “Big city. No room for Hulk.” The Hulk walked to a weapon rack and tested the weight of a big battleaxe.

A lump stuck in Thor’s throat. He remembered scores of adventures he’d spent with his brother and their friends, remembered stories told around bonfires, retellings of myths and histories that Loki augmented with his illusions. Only a decade or two felt like so long ago now. So much had happened, so much had changed.

“What else did he tell you?” Thor asked.

The Hulk exchanged the battleaxe for a long metal staff with weighted ends. He rested it on his shoulder and grinned. “Berserker warrior,” he said. “Angry like raging fire. Like Hulk. Thor berserker too once.”

Thor frowned at the memory of the destruction he’d wrought with that power. Never again. But there was something else too — that brother he remembered still existed. He wasn’t _gone_. He had been _here_ , in this very room, spinning stories of Asgard for the Hulk.

The Hulk stomped up and looked down at him.

“Thor sad,” he said.

Thor scoffed. “No I’m not.”

The Hulk shoved him. “Crying,” he said, accusingly.

Thor shoved him back. “I am not. I just— I have to get out of here. I have to find my brother.”

“Eh, Loki always come back,” said the Hulk.

“To _you_ , maybe,” said Thor sullenly. The Hulk shoved at him again and Thor squirmed out of the way and tried to swat away the giant’s hand. “Oh Hel,” Thor said. “This is what it’s like being the _little_ brother, isn’t it?”

“Thor puny,” the Hulk agreed.

“Am not,” Thor said. Trying to argue with the Hulk was reducing him to childish pettiness. “I have to get out of here. I have to find Loki. I have to find _Tony_ — Tony could be dead! He’s your best friend! Don’t you care?”

“Banner’s friend,” the Hulk said.

“He likes _you_ , too, you know. He always has. You’re being a really bad friend.”

“Thor go then!” the Hulk said, shoving him again, hard. “Hulk stay. Hulk like Sakaar. Hulk famous. _Everybody like Hulk!_ ”

“Fine!” Thor said. “I will!” He started toward the door. “I’m going. I’m really gonna leave.”

“Go,” the Hulk smiled nastily at him.

“I am,” Thor threatened, “I’m just gonna leave you here. You’ll be fine, right? You’ve got plenty of fr—” The obedience disk on Thor’s neck sent a jolt of energy through him as he tried to pass the perimeter sensors on the doorway and he collapsed to the floor.

The Hulk roared with laughter.

“You’re an asshole,” Thor said.

The Hulk stepped over him and out into the hallway. “Hulk go train. Bye now.”

Thor pushed himself up and watched him leave. The Valkyrie met him at the end of the hallway, playfully punching at his arm.

“Hey!” said Thor, scrambling to his feet, “Hey! Wait—” They walked off, and she didn’t even look at him. “This planet sucks,” Thor grumbled. “Jerk.”

“Indeed. I feel I may have been a bad influence, honestly.”

Thor froze. He turned, slowly, and there was Loki. The urge to run to him and hug him welled up in Thor, and he stopped himself and let it bleed slowly out of him. He was an illusion, and Thor would look like an idiot when he went crashing straight through him. It was for the best — Loki didn’t appreciate that kind of sentimentality anyway.

“It’s really not so bad here,” Loki said, putting his hands behind his back and pacing slowly toward the window. “Your friend Stark is certainly having fun.”

“You’ve seen Tony?” Thor asked, following him. “He’s all right, then?”

“Taken up with a scrapper crew, I believe.” Loki’s mouth quirked into a smile. “I imagine he’s _devouring_ the new technology. He’s wasted on that backwater realm.”

Thor paused, surprised to hear Loki utter such a compliment.

Until Loki continued, “He could be quite happy here.”

Thor frowned, and moved to stand in front of his brother, so he could look him in the face. “Like Bruce is happy?”

“Who?”

“Loki.”

“They’re not the same person, the Hulk and your _Bruce_.” Loki said. “ _The Hulk_ is happy here. Bruce — I haven’t seen him at all.”

“How long have you been here?” Thor asked him, dreading the answer.

“Six months, I suppose,” Loki said. “Stark was quite alarmed to hear it. He’s only been here a week.” He watched Thor, eyes calculating.

 _Six months_. It had been only a few minutes from the time Loki had fallen into the portal to when Tony had gone in after him — Thor imagined how long it would have been for him if he’d had to wait for Thor to get back to Asgard and set Heimdall to looking for him.

“Brother—” said Thor, but he didn’t have any more words than that. Loki looked away. “I’m glad you’re well,” Thor said. It felt weak.

“I _am_ well,” Loki said. “The time dilation is a boon, if anything. You don’t have to rush to leave. Take the time to catch your breath, to plan. It was only yesterday for you, wasn’t it?” His eyes skimmed over Thor, catching on the still-raw bruises from his fight with the Hulk, and on his bandaged arm where the burns from Jormungand’s poison were only just beginning to heal.

Thor rubbed the bandaged limb and he saw Loki stiffen. His brother didn’t say anything, just stared out the window and waited, until Thor opened his mouth to speak and then suddenly he was saying, “There’s this man, the Grandmaster — I’ve gained his favor—”

“Loki,” said Thor quietly.

“—it took me time to win his trust, of course. He’s completely mad, but he’s easy enough to get along with as long as—”

_“Loki.”_

Loki stopped talking. He licked his lips. For a long moment, they were both silent.

Thor took a deep breath and hoped his brother wouldn’t simply disappear the moment he started talking. “You set the serpent free,” he said — just a statement of fact, not an accusation. Loki nodded. “Why?”

“It was coming either way. It was either let it ambush us or be ready for it. I chose the latter.”

Thor had suspected as much. If it had been good enough to just seal it away, that would have been the end of it.

“It was going to kill me,” Thor said. “That was the part it was to play in Ragnarok — that was my fate.” It wasn’t a question — he wasn’t stupid, he’d manage to glean enough from what Loki and Hela had said, or refused to say. That was how Hela had called it up and led it to them — it had followed Mjolnir’s power in her hands. She’d brought it there to kill him. Just the same, Loki nodded confirmation. It was true, and he’d known it.

“Did you know,” Thor asked him, very slowly, “Did you know it would kill Jane, if she fought it?” He knew the answer already.

 _Lie to me_ , Thor wanted to beg him.

Loki whispered, “Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys. _Guys._ It finally happened. Three months, 17 chapters, 700 kudos, and almost 10,000 hits later, and someone finally asked me if the convenience store guy in chapter 2 was the Stan Lee cameo.
> 
> Yes. _Yes he was._
> 
> (Easter Sunday was busy! This week is busy too! I'm still gonna hustle editing up Chapter 19 though!)


	19. Liar's Paradox

The battle lulled. Jane stilled for a moment, panting, and Loki took the opportunity to slip to her side. How often had he been _this_ to Thor — the voice at his ear, whispering just the right words? As they had grown, that ear was often the only thing his brother would spare for him — never a thought, or a glance, but always that ear. And Loki had used it — with the meager power of his words, Thor was a weapon to be aimed wherever he pleased, like one of his many knives.

This was no different, he told himself. Loki got what he wanted, and he used whoever he had to to get it. Loki mattered to no one, so all that mattered to Loki was himself — first, last, and always.

(Lie after lie, like walls around his heart. They had gotten so heavy, somehow; like they were collapsing inward to crush what they were meant to protect.)

When he leaned in to speak, she turned to look at him.

“The serpent is coming for Thor,” he told her. “Only he can destroy it.”

Her wide brown eyes searched his face as she tried to puzzle him out. “And he’ll need Mjolnir for that?” she guessed.

Loki was glad for once that that oaf still believed himself too unworthy to wield the hammer. (Perhaps he’d had a momentary lapse of judgment — perhaps he’d been unworthy for a few seconds, but since then he’d stubbornly refused to even try. If Thor was unworthy now then it was his own self that had determined so, and not the damned hammer.)

“If he fights it,” Loki told her, “He’ll die.”

She understood, now. Her eyes slid away from him to stare vacantly as she tried to think. The solution was simple enough, but Loki would lead her to it if he had to.

He didn’t have to. They were so quick, these mortals. They had to be, with their mayfly lives, Loki supposed. That was something he had liked about them, once. Time spent on Midgard was reawakening a reluctant fondness for humanity he thought he’d long ago grown out of. She asked him, “If _I_ fight it, will _I_ die?”

He didn’t need to tell her no. Mjolnir was a weapon for heroes, and Loki knew how heroes were.

“Yes,” he whispered, and wished it were a lie.

Her eyes snapped back to him. There was a storm growing in them that reminded Loki fiercely of his brother. Surrender was not in _her_ nature, either. How had these two fools ever managed to disentangle themselves from one another?

“Will I _win?_ ” she asked.

It didn’t matter what he said. She’d fight anyway, for Thor. That was how heroes were. That was how people were, when they loved someone.

“I think you can,” Loki said, and told himself that he believed it.

As she nodded to tell him she was ready, he wanted to say something, anything, that would lessen the awfulness of it. Some empty promise that everything would be all right, something that would make her laugh.

All he said was, “It didn’t find me worthy.” He told himself it wasn’t an apology.

Jane gave him a crooked smile, and she turned and stood on her toes to brush a kiss against his cheek. She said, “I’m glad.”

 

*

 

“You had to know—” Thor was saying, pained, “You knew I’d never want this. You know that. You _do_ know that, don’t you? I’d have fought my fate — I don’t _want_ to die — but I would never have asked anyone else to bear it for me. Certainly— especially not _her_. Loki—”

Loki nodded. “I know,” he said. He sucked in a breath and opened his mouth, like there was more, like he would try to justify it— and then he just shut it again.

“ _Why?_ ”

Once, Thor could never have asked that question. Once, he would have believed there could only be one answer — because his brother loved him. But Loki was not the brother Thor remembered — perhaps had _never_ been the brother Thor remembered — and in the past years he had seen Loki do heinous things for reasons Thor couldn’t comprehend.

He had threatened Jane when they’d fought in Asgard, and Thor knew his brother hated him, and that he was capable of patience and cruelty. It was Loki who had brought Jane to the fight in the first place, and it was Loki who’d brought the serpent to her. Such a convoluted scheme for vengeance was not beyond his ability.

Thor didn’t want to believe that, but he hadn’t wanted to believe a lot of things. This was the way that Loki did battle: distract, divert, disappear. The knife always came eventually.

But Loki didn’t look like he felt victorious. He looked resigned. He looked like a prisoner standing before a judge, waiting to hear him proclaim a death sentence.

Thor didn’t understand anymore how it fit together.

Loki just shook his head. “Does it matter?”

“Please,” Thor said. “I know you at least a _little_ , I hope — do not tell me that words fail you now. Your honor may fail you, and even your sanity, but not your tongue, surely.”

“My tongue,” Loki said, “My silver tongue, my _liar’s tongue_. My great gift of _words_ — useless. Worth _nothing_ from a mouth no one thinks capable of sincerity. What could I ever say that you would believe?” He huffed out a little laugh. “Look at you!” he said. “You doubt me even as _I tell you that you doubt me_. Perhaps it is some trick to gain your sympathy, or to distract you from something else — or perhaps it is something the mad god simply _imagines_ —”

“Loki,” Thor said, interrupting him. Why did he have to be like this? Layers of obfuscation and subterfuge in every conversation, riddled with twists and traps. “You offered Jane up to die in my stead, and I would know why. I would hear you _say it_.”

When Loki still didn’t answer, Thor reached out, instinctively, to grab him and was surprised when his hand met solid flesh instead of empty air. He pulled Loki around to face him. _Silver tongue turned to lead_ , he thought. He wondered if Loki’s own mighty weapon could find him unworthy, as Mjolnir had Thor.

“ _Tell me_ ,” Thor begged him.

Finally, Loki said, “Do you _truly_ not know?”

Thor sighed. “Once, I thought we knew one another better than anyone else in the Nine Realms,” he said. “Now — if you have taught me nothing else these past few years, it is that I know you not at all.”

He let his hand fall from Loki’s shoulder, and they drifted apart, just a little. Thor looked out at the disaster of a city that stretched out below them and thought that he’d never been so far from home or family before. Everything was gone, now — mother, father, future, past. Asgard had always been within reach — _Loki_ had always been within reach — neither ever further than the sound of his own voice.

“Did you always hate me?” Thor asked.

“Always,” Loki said. The word felt like a great fist wrapped around Thor’s chest.

“Always,” he echoed. “Did you never love me, brother?”

“Always that, too,” Loki said. “I’ve never shied from saying so.” That was true, Thor knew. The grip on his heart lessened somewhat. “That’s the _why_ , of course.” Loki sighed. “I’ve always protected you, haven’t I? From all but _myself_ , at any rate.”

That was true, too, though Thor hated to admit it — especially because he’d always been ungrateful for it. He’d always been reckless, and he’d always called Loki’s caution cowardly.

“I cannot thank you for this, brother,” Thor said. He wasn’t sure he could even _forgive_ him. But he couldn’t hate him, either. He loved Loki, despite everything, and he couldn’t both love _and_ hate him. He couldn’t even imagine that turbulent coexistence.

He was a creature of paradox, Thor’s brother.

They stood for a long time, side by side.

“Perhaps it’s well past time to say our goodbyes,” Loki said eventually. He took a deep breath. “It was Odin that brought us together; it’s almost poetic that his death should split us apart. We might as well be strangers now. Two sons of the crown, set adrift. Maybe Hela _should_ have the throne — neither of _us_ was ever happy upon it.”

“I have to go home,” Thor said. “I have a responsibility to the people of Asgard.” He didn’t mean it to sound admonishing, but he knew it did. Loki frowned, and Thor studied him for a moment.

 _Haven’t we said goodbye enough already?_ Thor didn’t say. _We can’t keep running away_ , he didn’t say. _Come home_ , he didn’t say.

“Is this goodbye, then?” he asked.

“You needn’t rush,” Loki said. “You have plenty of time to rest and heal, if you’ll take it. Though I suppose patience has never exactly been one of your strengths.”

Thor nodded. He needed to think — needed time to put together a plan.

Loki left — with maybe a little too much haste, as they heard the heavy footsteps of the Hulk returning from his sparring session — and Thor threw himself face-down on the Hulk’s massive bed. _Rest and heal_ , he thought, and knew he didn’t have the patience for it.

“Thor sad?” he heard the Hulk ask. A big finger jabbed at Thor’s ribs.

Thor sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Sad.”

 

*

 

“She’s gonna throw you out another window,” Krevan warned, as Tony piled the parts he was carrying into the lizard’s arms and pushed his way through the crowd toward Scrapper 142.

“It’s fine,” he said, “We’re outside.”

She was sitting at a shop counter while the vendor served her a bowl of noodles with green sauce. It was topped with a pair of large bluish insects that Tony tried to mentally replace with shrimp. The food on this planet wasn’t awful as far as flavor went, but it was pretty terrifying to look at.

“Oh god,” said Krevan, “She’s gonna throw you _into_ a window this time.”

“So, hi,” Tony greeted the Asgardian, as he slid up to the counter just out of the reach of her arm (he hoped.) “I don’t suppose you remember me?”

She skewered one of the bugs on a chopstick-like utensil and ate it whole. “Yeah,” she said, “I threw you through a window and then your pet frost giant punched me. It was a good night.”

“My what?”

“She means G,” said Krevan, lurking behind Tony. To the scrapper, he said, “Don’t call him that. It’s rude.”

“‘Pet’ or ‘frost giant’?”

The vendor — an insectoid Sakaarian — clicked at Tony to ask if he was buying.

“Uh… yeah, you know what, I got paid today. I’ll have what she’s having,” he sat down next to her and said to Krevan, “I’m takin’ my lunch break, I’ll see you back at the hangar.”

“Your funeral,” he said, and shuffled off.

The scrapper chugged the rest of what Tony assumed was a beer and snapped her fingers at the vendor for another one as they set Tony’s bowl in front of him.

“You have about three seconds before I put you through that wall,” she said. The vendor chattered at her to keep the violence away from their establishment and she waved them off.

“Look, I heard you know the Hulk—”

“Yeah, you led with that last time,” she said. “Tell you what,” she said, popping the lid on her next beer, “I’ll give you ’till I’m done with this.” She started chugging.

“The Hulk disappeared from Earth like two years ago and I’ve been looking for him. I just want to make sure he’s okay, and,” Tony lowered his voice, “And get him out of here if he’s not.” It could be really stupid to tell her this, but hey, this was Sakaar. No place like Sakaar to gamble, right?

She finished the beer — the vendor already had another one for her, apparently she was a regular here — and studied Tony. Finally, she said, “Gonna eat that?” She gestured to the bugs on Tony’s bowl, which he’d been eating around.

“You know what, I told myself I was gonna try one but… no. Go for it.” He pushed the bowl toward her and she relieved him of them.

“So you want to get in to see the big guy,” she said ponderously, examining the last of the not-shrimp. “Maybe we can make a deal.”

“I’ll buy you dinner,” he offered immediately. She looked tempted. _Food_ , Tony made a mental note, _an Asgardian’s only weakness_.

“If you know the Hulk,” she said, “Do you know those friends of his, the brothers?”

This was a test, Tony thought. Another gamble. “Thor and Loki? Yeah.”

“More friends of yours?”

“…Sort of.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “I want information,” she said. “Two questions.”

“Shoot,” he said.

She held up one finger, “How did two sons of Odin get to Sakaar?”

Tony tried to decide whether he should tell her the truth. She did not strike him as particularly trustworthy. Worse, though, was that Tony wasn’t entirely sure what he shouldn’t say.

Had Loki warned him against mentioning him to her? What if that hadn’t just been because they weren’t on good terms? Tony felt very stupid.

Gambling was harder when you were doing it with something other than money.

“Their sister threw them through a portal,” Tony said. Her face went very dark, and Tony had the distinct impression he’d made a mistake.

“Hela?” she asked him. A quiet rage was simmering beneath the surface of her voice, quite unlike the violent annoyance he’d seen from her thus far.

Well, either she was going to kill him or Loki was. Double or nothing.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Hela.”

She sat quietly for a moment, visibly working to keep the lid on her anger. “Odin’s dead, then.” Her fingers were making dents in the edge of the counter and the vendor was nowhere to be seen. “Does she have Asgard?”

“That’s three questions.” Holy shit, he was stupid.

She rose from her seat and towered over him. She was not, physically, that big, but Tony was very, very aware that she could pop his head off his neck like a grape.

“She’s on Earth,” he said quickly. “Midgard.”

The scrapper nodded, sat back down, and started to aggressively finish her noodles. He gently pushed his half-eaten bowl toward her and she finished that, too. It seemed to placate her somewhat.

“It’s generally considered pretty shit form to take clarifications in response to a question as questions themselves,” she said. Tony found that he was not at all surprised that there was a formal method for the bartering of information on Sakaar, but he wasn’t sure he believed her.

Even so, he said, “That’s fair. What was the second question, then?”

She paused to finish the rest of her drink, and licked her lips. “Who’s ‘Jane’?”


	20. Lost and Found

The next day was a fight day — the Champion was on the fight roster but the “Lord of Thunder” was not — and so was the day after. Tony avoided the arena and Scrapper 142. Couldn’t look too desperate, he thought. She knew where he worked; she’d come find him.

He hoped.

She showed up three days after he’d talked to her, armed with an oversized battleaxe and heralded by a shout of, “Get out of my hangar, Asgardian,” from Gymir. The giant (frost giant? was that rude? Tony didn’t know and he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask) was holding the wing of an M-ship in place while Tony welded a plate into place on the top of it.

“Go melt, rimespawn,” she snapped back at him before nodding at Tony. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he said.

“I’m going training with the Hulk,” she said. “Coming?”

Tony looked at the plate. He was almost finished. “Gimme fifteen minutes,” he said.

“You have fifteen seconds,” she replied, walking out.

It was such a weird experience, to have to schedule his time around a _job_ , to not be able to just drop what he was doing to do something else. Tony was not sure he liked it. He tried to weld faster.

“So what do you have against Asgardians, anyway?” Tony asked Gymir while he worked impatiently.

Gymir huffed. “Do you ask what a Xandarian has against a Kree?” he asked.

“I have no idea what that means,” Tony admitted.

“They think they own the universe,” Gymir said. “They call themselves gods. You’re from Midgard, right? You should understand.”

“Annnnnd done. Lunch break!” Tony pulled off his gloves and held his hands up so his gauntlets could rocket over to put themselves on. He hopped down off the ship, catching himself with the repulsors so set himself on the floor.

“I hate that your tech is cooler than mine,” Gymir said.

Don’t make a pun, Tony told himself. “I’ll be back in like an hour,” Tony said. “In the meantime, I guess just… chill.” He ran.

The scrapper had left him behind, as promised, but she was taking her time walking down the street, and he managed to catch up to her without much trouble.

“What does a Xandarian have against a Kree?” he asked her.

“I dunno, a few centuries of war?” she said.

Tony winced. “Asgardians don’t make a lot of intergalactic friends, huh?”

She scoffed. “Don’t let Odin’s crap about peace and harmony in the Realms fool you. Asgard doesn’t make friends, we conquer worlds. Or we did, anyway.” She shrugged.

“When did that stop?”

“At nine of them,” she said. She paused long enough to let him catch up and when he did, she threw one muscled arm over his shoulders in a sort of mock-friendly-but-actually-unsubtly-reminding-him-that-she-could-snap-his-neck-with-a-twist-of-her-elbow gesture. “While we’re playing _questions and answers_ here,” she said, ignoring his squirming, “I’m pretty sure you still owe _me_ some answers.”

“I’m very uncomfortable,” said Tony.

“Tragic,” she said.

He squirmed against her bicep. “Where’d you even hear about Jane, anyway?”

“Loki talks in his sleep,” said the scrapper. He must have looked surprised because she said, “I mean, he never shuts up when he’s awake either, so it’s not exactly shocking.”

That wasn’t the part he was surprised by. Actually, Tony thought, he could definitely see Loki as the sort of guy who’d go for a woman who could twist him into a pretzel with her bare hands. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about her, and I’ll fill in the gaps?”

“Well you don’t have nightmares about a girl unless she’s dead or she tried to kill you, so there’s that,” said the scrapper, with the air of someone who was an expert on the subject. “I know Jane’s not an Asgardian name. I know he spent time on Midgard. I know he’s bitter as hell about mortal lifespans. Paints a pretty distinctive picture, but it’s never the simple answer with Loki.”

“When you put it like that, it sounds like you think she was a girlfriend he outlived.”

The quirk of her eyebrows said: _was she?_

“No,” he answered. “She was Thor’s girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend, I guess? Anyway, she was alive until — well, until about ten minutes ago, I guess.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t know what I saw. I know what it looked like, but I’ve made the mistake of assuming before. Like you said — never the simple answer with him.”

She let her grip on him slacken to something slightly less threatening. If this was just a jealous girlfriend thing, he would have expected her to be relieved. Instead, she seemed almost disappointed for a moment. Never the simple answer with Loki.

She said, “Did he kill her?”

“I don’t know,” Tony admitted.

She looked thoughtful for a while, and finally she said, quietly but without pity, “Guilt is a cruel master.”

She said _that_ with the air of someone who was an expert on it too.

 

*

 

_“Tony!”_ roared Thor. “I’m so glad you’re alive! I thought scrappers ate you!” At the sight of him, the Asgardian bounded over like the universe’s biggest golden retriever and hugged him.

“Oh, _come on_ ,” Tony said. “I’m one of Earth’s mightiest heroes. Give me a _little_ credit.” Nobody had been there to see him freak out, therefore nobody ever had to know about it.

“ _That’s_ one of Earth’s mightiest heroes?” the scrapper snarked. She made a _yikes_ face as she walked over to look at a shelf of bottles. Thor turned to try to talk to her but she was ignoring him.

Tony was aware, all at once, of a very large presence behind him. A pair of massive green arms wrapped around him and before he had the time to worry about his safety—

_“Friend!”_ the Hulk exclaimed. He hugged him _very gently_ but Tony felt a crushing of his chest anyway. He missed Bruce. He’d spent too much time being angry at him about disappearing to notice just how much.

_Bruce Banner is gone_ , he remembered Loki saying. It hadn’t hit him until just now.

“Hey, buddy,” Tony greeted him, his voice cracking. Nobody seemed to notice, and the Hulk set him back on his feet. “I like the haircut,” he told him, for lack of anything better to say.

“Look,” Thor was saying to the scrapper, “We need to talk—”

“We really don’t,” she said, picking up a bottle.

“If you’ll just listen,” he said, “Asgard in danger and if we don’t—” She pulled a little device off her belt. “Wait no no no—” She hit a button on it and he keeled over, convulsing.

“Take a hint,” she said. “Can’t you tell when someone wants to be left alone?”

She let him suffer just long enough to start walking away before she hit the button again.

“Odin—” he started.

“—is dead, yeah, I know. And his murderous psychopath of an heir is rampaging across Midgard, right?” She jerked her thumb at Tony. “He told me. Not my problem anymore.”

“You’re a _Valkyrie_ ,” Thor insisted.

“I’m a _scrapper_ ,” she said, “And I’m done. I’m not getting involved in another one of Odin’s family squabbles. I believed in the throne once — I fought Hela for it, and I lost _everything_. And you know what? It’s all a _scam_. Odin bought his precious Nine Realms with death and then he gilded the graves over with lies. If you want your throne you can fight for it yourself. _Your majesty_.”

She started to walk out. The Hulk looked between her and Thor and seemed torn. Poor guy just wanted his friends to get along, Tony thought. Bruce had looked at him and Steve like that, sometimes.

“Actually,” Tony said, and she paused long enough to glare at him. Thor looked at him curiously and Tony said to him, “I mean — _you_ abdicated, right? So… _not_ your throne.”

Thor gave him a look that said, very clearly, _what the hell_.

“Loki’s throne,” Tony said. He looked at the Valkyrie.

Her glare turned very cold. She threw her axe to the floor with a clatter and said, “Fuck _all three of you_.”

She left without another word.

Thor said, “Tony, what the hell.”

“You want her help, right?” Tony said. “She’s not gonna do it for _you_. She’s Loki’s friend — maybe it’d be worth it to her to stop him from getting killed by Hela, I don’t know.”

Thor shook his head and sat down on the steps that led up to a bed made of a giant skull. “Loki’s not coming,” he said, slumping visibly.

“Yeah, right,” said Tony. “Because he’s having _so much fun_ here.” To Thor’s questioning look, he said, “The parties, the drinking, I mean. I’ve been there. God, you two — does Asgard have therapists?”

“No,” said Thor.

“Yeah I guess things probably wouldn’t have gotten to the taking-over-the-world stage if you did.” Tony sighed.

“Whether he wants to stay _here_ is irrelevant,” said Thor, “He’s not coming with _me_. And it’s not fair to ask him to — he’s been miserable in Asgard his whole life, I’ve got no right to drag him back to that.” He nodded up at the Hulk. “You too, right?”

“Hulk stay,” the Hulk confirmed.

“Just you and me,” said Thor to Tony, a hard edge of bitterness in his voice.

“Friends stay,” said the Hulk, frowning.

“Like _you_ stayed after Sokovia?” Tony snapped at him. The Hulk crossed his arms and pouted. “Yeah, you were a great friend _then_. Just disappeared. Nobody knew what the hell happened to you.”

The Hulk huffed. “No one care about Hulk. Only Banner.”

“That’s shit and you know it,” said Tony.

“Nobody like Hulk,” the Hulk said.

“That’s shit, too. I like you.”

The Hulk turned and stormed away across the room, stomping. He turned back and said accusingly, “You scared of Hulk.”

“Well, yeah,” said Tony, “You’re terrifying.”

The Hulk huffed and turned away, but Tony wasn’t finished.

“You know who else terrifies me? Natasha. Thor.”

Thor was nodding. “Natasha _is_ terrifying.”

“Loki! He tried to take over the world, and then he lived in my house for a week. _Wanda Maximoff_ lived in my house for like _two years_ — yeah, you missed that, she’s low-key dating my robot son, who— oh yeah, you never _really_ had a chance to meet Vis, did you? Remember the Vision? The unstoppable vibranium android whose brain is part Ultron and part Loki’s mind-control stick? Also a friend. Steve tried to punch me to death in a bunker in Siberia. _All my friends are terrifying_ , what makes you think you’re special? You’re not even the scariest person I like. Pepper could rip out my heart. The worst you could do is kill me.”

Tony looked back and forth from Thor to the Hulk and said, “And look — I absolutely recognize the irony inherent in _me_ being the one to say this but seriously. You both? Need to get over your bullshit. _All of you_ need to get over your bullshit. We’re going home, we’re gonna save Earth, and then if Hela doesn’t murder us all, we’re gonna sit down and figure this out. _Together_.”

Thor was staring at him with a vaguely impressed look.

The Hulk came back and sat down next to Thor. “Fine,” he said, looking grumpy. “Hulk go home.” He looked up at Tony and shrugged. “How?”

Tony took a deep breath, “Okay I didn’t think that far ahead.”

The Hulk snorted. Thor said, “We’ve got to find out which of those wormholes is going to lead us back to Earth, and I have to get _this thing_ —” he pointed to an obedience disk on his neck “—off of me. After that, we’ll need a ship.”

Tony pulled out a screwdriver out of one a pocket. “Lemme take a stab at the disk,” he said, dropping to his knees beside Thor. “Who’d know what wormhole to take?”

“Loki?” suggested the Hulk.

Thor made an uncertain sound but said, “He probably would. He’d keep his options open.”

Tony slid the flat head of the screwdriver between the claws of the disk and tried to pry it up.

“What if you can’t convince — _ow_ — convince him to go with us?”

“Even if he won’t go with us, he might still help us,” Tony said, exchanging the screwdriver for a smaller one as the Hulk stood and began pacing impatiently. “Or he might sell us out to the Grandmaster. Never can tell with that guy.”

“Ugh,” said Thor. Tony thoroughly agreed. He tried unsuccessfully to pull off the little bubble in the center of the disk but realized the access point to it was probably on the underside. That was fair, he supposed. The Hulk made an exasperated sound. He walked to his liquor shelf and picked up a bottle, then stomped out of the room.

“Everybody on this planet is an alcholic,” Tony said. “Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way.” He paused, rummaging in his pockets for a pair of wire cutters. “If we get off Sakaar at all, your guy on Asgard should be able to just beam us up, right? I mean, I assume he can’t just beam us off of Sakaar in the first place because of the Narnia time.”

“We’d have to stand still for a few years,” Thor confirmed. “Ow. The Bifrost can’t get us off a ship without damaging the ship, but you do make a point. If we can’t get to Earth, anywhere in the Nine Realms would work fine — probably even beyond that.”

“Yeah, this is gonna hurt.” Tony pulled the disk off of Thor’s skin as far as he dared and tried to clip off one of the teeth with the wire cutters. It was too thick, and Tony had to give that up.

“I mean I was just going to steal the fob from the Valkyrie but this is just as good,” said Thor.

“Hey,” said Tony, moving from his uncomfortable crouch to sit on the stair next to Thor, “Shut up.” If it was easy, Sakaar wouldn’t have so many slaves, he supposed. “You said ‘anywhere in the Nine Realms’ — what does that mean, exactly? What are the Nine Realms?”

“The Nine Realms are the… well, nine _realms_ within the universe over which Asgard presides.”

“Yeah, but what’s a _realm_? A planet?”

“Some, though the surrounding systems are part of each realm as well, even if no one really lives there,” said Thor. “Some, like Asgard, are small and densely-populated. Others are like Midgard — large, cloistered worlds. Others are scattered across vast systems, like Vanaheim, wide and diverse.” He sounded almost nostalgic as he said it. Almost homesick.

No Asgardian was going to willingly give that up to stay on this scrap heap, Tony thought. Not one without something to hide from, anyway. He’d forgotten, while Thor was talking, why he’d asked the question in the first place.

“I thought—” said Thor quietly. “One day, when her work was done, I thought maybe she’d come explore it with me. That was her dream — to see other worlds.”

Tony was spared from having to find a way to respond to that as the Hulk stomped back into the room. He walked up to them and leaned down, hand extended. Held between his thumb and forefinger was the obedience disk’s control device.

They stared.

“How?” Thor asked incredulously, taking it.

“Hulk ask nicely.”

Thor zapped himself twice before he found the right button to pop the disk off his neck.

“That’s more like it!” he said, standing up and pocketing both items.

“So, _Lord of Thunder_ ,” said Tony. “Now what?” He looked around at the three of them and supposed half the team wasn’t a bad place to start. _The better half_ , he thought. Stubborn smugness to smother the feeling of loss.

Thor approached a ball lying against the wall and flipped it up into his hands with the toe of his boot. “ _God_ of Thunder,” he corrected. “And now…” he aimed the ball to throw it at the big main window of the room, “We get the hell out of—” he threw it, hard, and it bounced back and hit him in the face, knocking him over.

“Nice,” said Tony, as he hopped back up.

“Hey,” said Thor, “Shut up. Anyway, now we get the hell out of here!”

And with that, he ran full-speed at the window and smashed straight through it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late chapter; I left it open in a tab and forgot to hit post. Fail.


	21. Freakin' Out

“Do you think anyone saw us come in here?” said Thor, peeking out the back of the quinjet.

“Just fans looking for an autograph,” said Tony.

“Hulk famous,” the Hulk agreed. They’d made for the quinjet — which was parked in the Sakaarian equivalent to a used-car lot visible from the tower — as fast as they could, but the Hulk was… conspicuous. Halfway there, Thor had snatched a towel off a clothesline and threw it over the Hulk’s head. It did not help. At all.

“I mean,” Tony said, “I can think of _one_ way you could be a little less noticeable.”

The Hulk frowned at him. “No Banner. Only Hulk.”

“Right,” Tony said.

“Hulk always Hulk,” he said angrily.

“Right.” Knowing it didn’t make it feel like any less of a gut punch. He only realized how quiet it had gotten when Thor set a hand heavily on his shoulder.

“You all right?” Thor asked.

“Fine,” said Tony, even though he wasn’t.

Thor squeezed his shoulder and nodded. “All right,” he said. “So, the quinjet—”

“Yeah,” said Tony.

Thor started pressing buttons and flipping switches. He got the flight deck to power up before Tony could move to help him, so Tony sat down instead. The Hulk wouldn’t look at him.

“It’s not your fault,” Tony told him.

_“Voice verification required,”_ the quinjet was saying.

“Thor,” Thor told it.

_“Access denied.”_ Tony felt a smile tug at his cheeks.

“Thor, son of Odin.”

_“Access denied.”_ Genuinely, Tony had never thought this was going to be a problem. Thor could fly, he didn’t need to be able to turn on a quinjet.

“God of Thunder?”

_“Access denied.”_

“Strongest Avenger.” Tony snorted into his hands.

_“Access denied.”_

“Tony,” Thor whined.

“It’s _Point Break_ ,” Tony wheezed.

“I _know_ it’s _Point Break_ , you asshole.”

“Welcome, Point Break,” said the quinjet.

Thor made the wordless sound of defeated annoyance he usually reserved for when Loki got on his nerves. He poked at the quinjet’s console.

“If we can pull up the flight logs—” Thor started.

Tony snapped his fingers, “—we can find out what wormhole the Hulk came through!” he finished, darting over to help.

“Yeah, sure,” Thor said absently, poking at the touchscreen as the Hulk came to look over their shoulders.

“No, this one here,” Tony said, pointing to a different option. Thor brushed his hand away. “That’s a record of incoming transmissions.”

“Is it?” questioned Thor, hitting the wrong button.

_“Nice work, big guy. We don’t know where Ultron’s headed, but you’re going very high, very fast,”_ said Natasha on the recording. _“So I need you to turn this bird around, okay? We can’t track you in stealth mode—”_

“No!” the Hulk roared. “No Banner!”

Thor tackled Tony out of the way as the Hulk smashed the console with his fist, and only let him up once the Hulk had finished thrashing and collapsed to the floor.

He dwindled, green receding from pink flesh. When it was over, he lay on the floor of the now-wrecked quinjet, groaning.

“Bruce,” Tony choked. He stopped, pieces clicking into place, and looked at Thor. “You crafty bastard,” he said. “You did that on purpose.”

“Did I?” Thor asked smugly.

“You’re an idiot,” Tony said, dropping to his knees beside Bruce. “You should have known the Hulk was gonna break everything. How are we gonna get the flight logs now?” He hauled his friend (not gone, still alive, still here) into a crushing hug.

“Tony?” Bruce asked, sounding groggy.

“Eh. It was worth it,” Thor said.

 

*

 

When the world had resolved itself into something less like a swirling mess of color and sound, the first thing Bruce Banner managed to get out was, “What happened to your hair?”

“I’ve been stuck on an alien planet without a barber for a week,” said Tony, letting him go and holding him at arm’s length to grin at him. It was mildly unsettling.

Bruce squinted at him. “I meant — I meant Thor but — what do you mean alien planet? A week? How did — space — _what?_ ”

Thor cuffed Tony gently on the back of the head, making him snicker. “Don’t freak him out, he’ll Hulk out again.”

“It’s too late,” said Bruce, “I’m already freakin’ out — why am I naked, where are my stretchy pants? How did you get on an alien planet — oh god is it Loki, is Loki back I thought he was dead—”

Tony burst into a peal of manic laughter. Thor said, “Well this is gonna be good.”

“Okay, okay,” said Tony, “This is going to sound — well okay part of it is going to sound familiar, but the other part is going to sound completely insane. And —” he started rummaging around in the wreckage “— there’s gotta be a change of clothes in here somewhere.”

“You look, I’ll talk,” said Thor. To Bruce he said, “So, it turns out I have a sister, and she’s — well, she’s basically Loki but worse.”

“She’s not even close to ‘Loki but worse,’” said Tony, “I mean, conceptually, a sibling of yours making Earth the jumping-off point for a cosmic takeover while allying themself with HYDRA sounds like ‘Loki but worse’ but in practice she’s more like ‘if, when Loki got here, you decided to help him instead of us, and also you had a pet dragon and a zombie army.’”

“Shut up and look for clothes,” said Thor.

“Oh god what is happening,” Bruce said to Thor, “I thought you were supposed to freak me out _less?_ ”

“Anyway, she threw Loki and Tony and I into space and we found you and now we’re trying to escape the planet where were captured and forced to fight one another in brutal gladiatorial combat for the amusement of an insane dictator.”

“Wait, wait, wait—” Bruce went over that sentence in his head again as Tony dumped a change of clothes into his hands. “Did you say you — did you find me _in space?_ Are we in space _right now?_ ” He stood and started to dress.

“We are not _in space_ ,” said Thor.

Bruce breathed a sigh of relief.

Tony scoffed. “He doesn’t mean _in space_ in space. He means _not on Earth_ in space.”

“ _Oh_ , yeah, we’re in space, then.”

“Oh god,” Bruce said, pausing in the middle of pulling a shirt over his head. “I’m freakin’ out.”

“Don’t freak out,” said Thor. “Everything’s fine. Everything’s good. The sun’s going down—”

Bruce squirmed, adjusting his clothes. “Why do you have to wear your pants so tight?” he growled at Tony.

“Uh, it’s called _being fashionable_. So, how did you not know you were in space? Have you just been the jolly green giant since Sokovia?”

“Oh, man, Sokovia. Did we save the city? How’s Nat?”

“I mean, we saved… what we could, I guess,” Tony shrugged. “We got all the people out of the city, stopped Ultron from killing the entire human race. Stopped Ultron. Natasha’s fine, I’m sure. It’s been a while. Are you gonna keep— do you want to swap pants?”

Bruce looked at what Tony was wearing — a fairly reasonable pair of cargo pants. “Yeah, actually, that’d be great. You be the fashionable one.”

_“Sakaar, hear ye—”_

“Who the hell is that?” Bruce asked.

“That would be the insane dictator,” said Thor.

“Right,” said Bruce, “Brutal gladiatorial combat. Hey — did we fight? You and me?”

“Yes,” Thor confirmed. “I won.”

Tony practically giggled.

“Right, I’m sure you did,” said Bruce indulgently.

“I did. Easily.”

“All right,” said Tony, once they were both fully-dressed, “Let’s get moving.”

 

*

 

Loki and the Valkyrie walked in lockstep across the mirrored floor of the Grandmaster’s chambers. The number of guards had been increased, and Topaz stood at the Grandmaster’s side in combat gear.

Probably something to do with the announcement the Grandmaster had just made — something about a “seductive Lord of Thunder” stealing the Grandmaster’s Champion.

Loki loved his brother, but sometimes he really wanted to strangle him.

Now was one of those times.

“I’m very upset,” the Grandmaster was saying. “Very, very upset. And now — see, when I’m upset, I like to blame people. You know who I want to blame for this?”

“Grandmaster, I—” Loki started.

“Ah ah ah— don’t interrupt me!”

Loki’s mouth snapped shut. Topaz tried to hand the Grandmaster her staff. “Here ya go,” she said.

“What? No, he was just interrupting. We don’t melt people for interrupting, that’s not a capital offense,” said the Grandmaster. Loki liked that about him — he was a maniac, certainly, but a _reasonable_ maniac. “Anyway. My precious Champion has gone missing and it is all because of _your_ contender,” he said this to the Valkyrie; to Loki he directed, “And _your_ — what is he exactly? Friend? Boyfriend? Whatever, that party crasher, uhh—” he snapped his fingers, like it was on the tip of his tongue.

“The cyborg,” supplied Topaz.

_“Tony Stark,”_ said the Grandmaster.

“My dear friend,” Loki said, “If you were to give me twelve hours, I could bring all three of them to you.”

The Grandmaster looked doubtful.

“I could do it in two,” snapped the Valkyrie, annoyingly.

“I could do it in one,” Loki amended. He was going to stab her.

Already the Grandmaster was starting to look placated, rubbing his hands together. He couldn’t resist a game.

Maybe he wouldn’t stab her, Loki thought.

“You know what? I like this. This sounds good. How about that, a little contest. We’ll see which of you can get them first, huh? And as for what you’ll win if you do—”

Topaz tried to hand him the melt stick again and he pushed it away gently.

“Maybe, maybe,” he said. “We’ll see how I feel about it. Ready? Get set — go.” He made a shooing motion with his hands.

Loki left in a hurry, the Valkyrie a step ahead of him despite his longer strides. He snatched at her wrist to pull her up short once they were past the guards.

“What have you done—” he started to ask her. She punched him — a single smart sock right to the jaw, just hard enough to let him know she wasn’t messing around. He stumbled back, swearing, and looked up to find the bright edge of a long dagger in his face.

“I don’t answer to you, _Your Majesty_.”

Loki leveled a suspicious glare at her. “What happened?”

The Valkyrie just snarled and turned to continue walking.

Loki opened his mouth to call her and realized, with some annoyance, he had no name to call her _by_. He grabbed for her again — for her shoulder this time, and the moment he touched her, she whirled on him.

The blade flashed, and he jerked away instinctively. Loki’s cheek stung like she’d slapped him, and after a stunned moment passed, he felt the hot tickle of liquid on his skin, crawling along his jaw, down his neck—

He clapped his hand to his face. He ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek and caught the faint taste of blood.

“Goodness,” he said, with a shaky laugh, somewhat muffled by the palm over his mouth.

“You asshole,” she said. She had a funny look on her face — still angry, but bordering on unease. She was shaken, and trying to hide it. She’d meant to strike him, Loki thought, but she hadn’t meant to lay open his face from jaw to cheekbone. “You didn’t tell me you were king.”

“Ah,” he said.

She glowered at him. “How did _you_ become king?” She said it like an insult, but Loki beamed at her.

“Like any good king of Asgard,” he said. “I _stole_ it.” The punchline to a colossal joke she’d unknowingly helped him set up the entire six months they’d known one another. All her ire at Asgard — all her complaints about the liars and thieves — and Loki was the worst of them, because he’d stolen all of it from Odin himself.

It took a moment, but finally, she laughed.

 

*

 

“I don’t understand,” said Bruce for the third time, looking more horrified than ever, “What are they _doing?_ ”

The streets of the city were packed with people — dancing, yelling, partying, holding signs and wearing masks. Green was everywhere.

“They’re doing what the boss told them to,” Tony said. “Celebrating the Champion.”

“The Hulk was the Champion?”

“Oh yeah,” said Tony, “They love him here.”

From another part of the street, a chant was going up — _“Hulk Hulk Hulk!”_

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” said Bruce, looking faintly green. It was probably because he’d been nailed in the face with some paint a minute ago, but it made Thor uneasy anyway. He patted Banner on the shoulder and tried to keep an eye on their surroundings.

“The sun’s going down, the sun’s getting real low—”

“Will you stop that,” Bruce snapped at him.

“It’s fine,” Tony told him, tugging him faster, “We’re almost there.”

“I think we’ve been spotted,” said Thor. Absent the Hulk, he had inherited the position of most conspicuous. He’d thrown the towel over his own head as a disguise, but his companions weren’t very impressed by it.

He nodded to a large scrapper walking decisively toward them.

“Yeah, well, just… just try not to draw any attention to yourself,” said Tony. He moved to intercept their pursuer and Thor gently ushered Bruce away.

“Hey, buddy—” Tony started.

“Outta my way,” snarled the scrapper, gunning for Thor.

Tony’s gauntlet clanged off its skull as it tried to pass, sending it sprawling. The crowd barely noticed, except a few people, who cheered.

“This planet is insane,” Bruce groaned. Tony grabbed his arm and dragged him down a side street.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve got some friends here, we’ll be safe.”

A spaceship part went flying through the window of a building (some kind of garage) not far from them, causing the pretty Hurctarian standing in front of it to shriek in surprise. She spotted them and ran toward them.

“Tony!” she said, “You better get in there, quick. G’s gonna kill your friend!”

“My what?” said Tony.

“Who’s this? What are they saying?” Bruce questioned.

Thor looked at Tony, “Does the Valkyrie know about this place?”

“Oh god,” Tony said, rushing past the girl and through the door.

 

*

 

_“I’m going to crush you, you obnoxious little cockroach!”_ Gymir was roaring as Tony ran in the door.

Krevan, a Luphomoid Tony recognized distantly as Gravda’s girlfriend, and the scrapper that Thor called _Valkyrie_ were standing off to the side. The Valkyrie was chugging a beer.

“Oh shit,” Bruce said from behind him somewhere, “It’s Loki!”

“Does this… does this guy not have a translator?” Gravda asked as she walked in behind Bruce and Thor.

“You know I like a long shot,” said Krevan, “But I’m pretty sure if G ever finds out I bet against him, he’ll tear my arm off, so.”

“I wouldn’t bet against him anyway,” said Kyorii. “Didn’t he slaughter his way through the Contest a couple cycles before the Hulk showed up? Now _that_ would be a match.” She looked over at the Valkyrie, “Aren’t you gonna stop them?”

The Valkyrie took another sip of her beer. “Nah, let ’em let off some steam.”

“You Asgardians have no regard for property damage.”

“Nope.”

They watched, with minimal concern, as Gymir swung massive, bladelike hunks of ice at Loki, who fended them off with one of his conjured swords.

“My brother has slain dozens of frost giants with no trouble at all,” Thor said to them.

The lizardman sized him up. “What’s your wager?”

“Krevan,” said Tony, “You have a gambling problem.”

“Sakaar _is_ a gambling problem,” the big lizard said with a shrug.

“Fifty k,” said the Valkyrie, “On the cockroach.”

“What’s happening?” Bruce asked, tugging at Tony’s arm.

“They’re taking bets.”

“This planet is insane.”

“Hey,” Tony called to the combatants, “Can we call a time out here or?”

Gymir had disarmed Loki and snatched him up by the throat, and the Asgardian wriggled in his hand like a picked-up cat.

Thor and the Valkyrie made nearly-identical shouts of angry warning as the frost giant squeezed and they all heard the crackling, popping sound of ice forming.

Loki squawked, less in pain than in frustration, and Gymir stared quizzically at him. Loki’s skin where his hand was touching was changing color, grey-blue spreading slowly from his neck and up his face. Loki squirmed to look at them. He stopped struggling.

Then he swung his body up to hook his legs around the frost giant’s arm, then suddenly there was foot after foot of golden-scaled _snake_ spilling through Gymir’s hand, wrapped around his forearm. He was caught off-guard, but he managed to grab the serpent before it could sink its fangs into him.

It slipped through his grasp, winding its way around his throat and rearing back again to strike, and then it was Loki again, sitting on the giant’s shoulders, his legs wrapped around Gymir’s neck, daggers poised to drive them into him.

Gymir grabbed him and flung him toward the onlookers, then stepped back, rubbing at his neck. Two nicks, right near his eyes, dripped blue-black blood like dark tears.

Loki hit the floor with a rush of breath and a clatter of metal.

“Pff,” huffed Gymir, “Forget it. I thought you were Asgardian, not some Jotun _runt_.”

“I’m _Loki_ ,” the god snarled, rising to a sitting position and throwing his hair out of his face with a snap of his neck, “I’m _whatever I want to be_.” He raised his chin and looked down his nose at Gymir, like no matter how big the giant was, he was no more than an ant.

Gymir made a disgusted sound. “Maybe so,” he sneered. “Whatever you were born as, however you change your skin, you’ve got an Asgardian’s arrogant heart.”

He meant it as an insult, surely, but Loki looked nothing if not triumphant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Sorry for the wait on this chapter. Fandom pessimism re: Infinity War has had me down for the past week or so. (I still haven't seen it yet; I will on the 6th... it's gonna be a long week ugh.) But anyway, I'm hoping we're back to two updates a week now that stuff has slowed down for me.


	22. Green

This was a very weird dream, Bruce Banner had quietly determined. It was a very weird dream, and any moment now he would wake up from it.

The tall, pointy alien that had met them outside — it looked like a woman to Bruce, but he didn’t want to assume — was reprimanding the blue giant in a voice that was equal parts melodic and mechanical. The giant responded in an appropriately booming humanish voice, in a language that sounded _almost_ Germanic. Over by the wall, Tony conversed in English with a giant bipedal lizard whose language seemed to be composed entirely of vowels.

Loki said, “Hello, Bruce,” and beckoned him with a finger.

“So,” Bruce said, shuffling over hesitantly, “Last time I saw you, you were kind of trying to kill everybody. Where are you at these days?” Thor was standing _right there_. He probably wouldn’t let Loki kill him. Or mind-whammy him. Unless Loki had mind-whammied everybody else already, which would honestly explain some of the craziness.

“It varies moment to moment,” Loki said dryly, with a smile that was uncomfortably predatory. Green light glimmered on his fingers.

Bruce tried to back up, but Thor had him by the shoulder.

“Ignore him,” Thor said. “He's just being a jerk.”

Loki’s hand extended toward him, and Bruce leaned away as far as he could before the Asgardian tapped him on the forehead. The touch buzzed unpleasantly through his skull, and—

“—getting sick of these thrice-damned godlings all over my planet,” the giant was saying, now in English, as the alien dabbed at his wounded face with a rag.

“Just out of curiosity — why thrice?” asked Loki.

“Once for Ymir, once for Laufey, and once for my own self. You Asgardians are a _blight_.”

Meanwhile—

“You’re good at what you do,” said the lizard to Tony, “But I think at this point you’re fired.”

“Yeah, sounds about right,” Tony said, grinning at him.

Thor clapped Bruce on the shoulder. “All right?” he asked.

“This isn’t the weirdest dream I’ve ever had but it’s sure on the list,” Bruce told him. Thor chuckled. His hand on Bruce’s shoulder was heavy and real, grounding.

“All right,” said the tattooed woman — she must have been Asgardian, Bruce thought, since he’d been able to understand her before Loki’s spell — “I’ll get these idiots out of your hair.” She glanced from Tony to Thor and jerked her head.

“Come on, brother,” said Thor, putting his other hand on Loki’s shoulder.

Loki was sparing one last deeply condescending look for the big blue guy, who sneered at him and said, “An Asgardian and a frost giant calling each other _brother_. What a sorry sight.”

“Wait,” said Tony, “I thought _you_ were a frost giant?”

“Jotun.”

“Are those the same thing?”

“Are we leaving?” Loki whined, suddenly eager to go.

“Wait, wait,” said Tony. He looked at the giant — frost giant? Jotun? “Do you know how to get back to the Nine Realms?”

“Of course,” said the jotun. “Why should I tell you?”

Tony’s shoulders sagged. “Come on, man.”

“Nobody does anything for free on Sakaar,” the tattooed woman advised Tony, moving toward the door.

There was a beat as the groups separated, and then Thor said, “If you tell us which wormhole to take, I’ll tell you the funniest thing you’ll ever hear.”

The jotun snorted. “Funnier than _you?_ ” Thor smiled at him. A wide, smug grin utterly devoid of joy. It was disconcerting to see it on Thor’s face instead of Loki’s, which gave further credit to the Loki-has-mind-whammied-everybody theory Bruce had been about to discard. (He edged away from Loki, who was gazing at Thor with a look in which bewilderment fought with pride for dominance.)

The jotun snickered. “Fine,” he said, “You’ll kill yourself getting through it anyway. Asgard’s right on the other side of the Devil’s Anus.”

“Sorry,” said Bruce, “The what now?”

“So what’s the funniest thing I’ll ever hear?”

“Funnier than _me?_ ” Thor echoed. “I’m just Thor, _son of Odin_.” He strode toward the door, sweeping Bruce and Loki along with him. “My _brother_ is king of Asgard.”

Bruce thought that was more horrifying than funny, but as they left, the giant’s gobsmacked expression melted into a howl of laughter.

“I don’t think I appreciate that,” Loki huffed at Thor as they followed the tattooed woman down the street.

“Which part?” Thor asked him, “Being made a joke of?”

Loki looked thoughtful. “Not being the one to make it,” he decided.

Thor chuckled. “I apologize, brother.”

Loki made a dismissive gesture.

“Do you two have _any idea_ how often you say ‘brother’?” Tony asked them, “Because it’s _a lot_.”

In front of them, the woman intercepted an armed, masked, alien coming toward them and pitched it, screaming shrilly, into the air. Bruce fell in love with her a little bit.

 

*

 

The group crept down a number of back alleys, converging eventually onto a ramshackle apartment building that looked much nicer inside than out. Loki had slid away from Thor to walk at the woman’s side, and they spent the entire way snarking back and forth at each other, somehow equal parts antagonistic and companionable.

“So who is she?” Bruce asked Thor and Tony. She seemed familiar, but he had no idea where he’d have met an Asgardian that wasn’t Thor or Loki.

“A _Valkyrie_ ,” Thor said. Bruce could practically _see_ the hearts in his eyes.

“Loki’s girlfriend?” said Tony, with a shrug. Thor looked horrified.

“Oh my god, Tony, a man and a woman can be friends without being _together_ ,” Bruce hissed at him.

“Yeah, _Tony_ ,” said Thor.

Tony looked back and forth between them. “Oh my god,” he said, “You’re _jealous_.”

“I’m not jealous,” said Bruce, “Why would I be jealous. I have—” he stammered.

“—a _type_ ,” Tony finished for him.

“No — well. I mean. I guess. But—”

“Green with envy?” Tony asked him. Bruce smacked him in the ribs and he cackled.

“Hey,” said Thor, “Shut up.” When Tony went to object, Thor nodded up at Loki and the Valkyrie, whose casual barbs had devolved into some kind of quiet argument.

“That’s what’s wrong with Asgard,” the Valkyrie said, loud enough for them to hear, not hiding it, “The secrets. The whole golden sham.”

Loki was nodding, as if considering. “Perhaps that’s the truth of ruling. A certain amount of ruthless scheming is what it takes to be a great king,” he said. There was something pointed about the way he said it.

She snorted. “All things considered, I’d rather serve a good man than a great king, and no offense, but I don’t think you’re _either_.” She slipped past him to unlock an apartment door, so she didn’t see the way he smiled, or the sly look he flashed at Thor, who paused a step.

The brothers seemed to have a whole conversation in that shared glance, and then Loki followed her into the room and threw himself onto a couch like he lived there. (Maybe he did, Bruce thought. The place was green, which was a color he was much more comfortable associating with Loki than with… certain other individuals.)

“Help yourself to food,” she said, walking into another room.

“I can’t believe you have actual food here,” Tony said, squinting into the little kitchen by the door. “Is that peanut butter?” He wandered around the apartment with his eyes, finally settling on a knife buried in the wall, and whistled.

Bruce felt weirdly at-ease. He made himself a sandwich and sat on a stool by the counter. The Valkyrie reappeared from the other room and slapped a belted, sheathed sword onto the counter. She gave him an appraising look.

“So who are you?” she asked.

“Me? I’m Bruce.”

“I feel like I know you,” she said.

“I feel like I know you, too!” he replied.

She pulled a fruit out of a bowl on the counter and took a bite out of it, and turned to regard the rest of their motley crew. “So,” she said. Her eyes flicked to Loki, who was relaxing impassively. Tony, still teetering somewhere on the edge of manic, had flopped down beside him.

“So,” said Thor. He gestured out the window, at the sky. Pale blue was dotted with little storms — swirling holes, like tornadoes. Bruce rose from his seat to come stare at them. “Which of these is the Devil’s Anus?”

“That would be this one, here,” she said, indicating a gigantic vortex of death.

“Oh,” said Thor, with slightly less enthusiasm.

“That looks like a collapsing neutron star inside of an Einstein-Rosen bridge,” Bruce said.

“Sorry, what?” said Tony, scrambling up to look.

“Pff, who didn’t do the homework now?” said Bruce, “Didn’t you ever read any of Jane Foster’s stuff? Man, she’d probably kill to see this thing.”

He didn’t notice how deathly quiet it had gone until the Valkyrie took a noisy bite out of her fruit. “Well,” she said, “We need another ship. That would tear mine to pieces.”

Thor was nodding. “Right. We need something reinforced, something that can stand the geodetic strain from the singularity.”

Bruce looked over at him, surprised. “And has an offline power steering system that can function without the on-board computer.”

“And we need one with cup holders,” said the Valkyrie. “Because we’re all gonna die, so, drinks!”

“Do I know you?” Bruce said to her, “I feel like I know you.” She was nodding, and she made a gesture of agreement.

“Wait,” said Thor, “‘We’? Does that mean you’re coming with us?”

She sighed. “Look,” she said, “I’m not a Valkyrie, or — I don’t care, you can call me that, if you want, but — I don’t want to be a Valkyrie again. I’m not interested in serving Asgard and I don’t care about your stupid throne. I’ve spent centuries running from it, hiding here. Sakaar seemed like a good place to drink and forget, to die.”

“I _was_ kind of thinking you drank too much,” Thor admitted. She looked at him like he had started speaking in tongues.

“I’m not going to stop drinking,” she clarified. “But I don’t want to forget. If it’s about beating Hela… well. If I’m going to die, it might as well be putting my sword through the heart of that murderous hag.”

“Good,” said Thor, smiling.

“I’ve seen a couple of transport ships go in and out of the wormholes but not that big one,” said Tony. “Most of the scrapper ships are rickety little things, all the big stuff belongs to the Grandmaster.”

“Oh no,” said Loki, “If only someone had had the foresight to get close to him and steal the access codes to his security system. Imagine.”

“You can get us into the garage without setting off any alarms?” Thor asked him.

“It’s quite amazing, really, what one can do with a little _patience_.”

The Valkyrie tossed her fruit at him and he caught it and found a place to take a bite.

“Hey, uh, this sounds like a great plan and all,” said Bruce, “But is there a reason we’re suddenly trusting Loki? I feel like a minute ago he was totally ready to just throw any one of us out a window.”

“He’s always ready to throw someone out a window,” said Tony.

“Don’t throw mortals out of windows, by the way,” Loki said to the Valkyrie, “It kills them.”

She gestured to Tony.

“Well, not him.”

Tony shrugged at Bruce. “Turns out it’s just an Asgardian thing.”

“So,” Thor said to the Valkyrie, “You’re saying you’ll help us?”

“I’m saying — that team you were putting together. I want to be on it. Who else is on it?” She looked around at them.

“Well, me,” said Thor, “And Tony, of course. Bruce.”

“Loki?”

“No,” Loki said, as Bruce shook his head emphatically.

“Well. He’s not _on_ the team, but he’s in the general vicinity—”

“He’s in the area,” Tony said.

“Kind of beside the team,” Thor said, nodding.

“Team-adjacent, you might say.”

“Yeah,” said the Valkyrie. “Has it got a name?”

Thor grinned. He looked at Bruce, at Tony. He nodded.

“We’re the Avengers.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I saw Infinity War! Still gonna try to keep spoilers out of the comments for now, at least for a little while longer. But I'm back on Tumblr if you wanna scream about it or anything. I've got a short IW fic I want to work on but mostly I want to get back on top of Question for now. Hopefully I can get back to biweekly updates, ahh! (Sorry this chapter is a bit short!)


	23. Reconnection

The plan was simple. The Valkyrie would bring Korg a handful of guns. Tony and Bruce (the latter of whom objected that this had all escalated very quickly) would shut down the obedience disk mainframe. Loki would help Thor steal a ship. Thor would stop Loki from betraying them all.

Simple.

Thor reached into his pocket and fiddled with the obedience disk there as Loki input a code to a security door on the ground floor of the Grandmaster's palace. The guards had run off for the arena when the alarm went up signaling that the others' pieces of the plan had fallen into place.

"We should talk," Thor said.

"I don't know what about," Loki said, hefting one of the laser rifles they'd nicked from the guards. "What's left to say?" There was a finality about it.

What  _was_  left to say, in the end? Nothing, really. Nothing but  _I love you_  and  _goodbye_.

They took the guards in the next room by surprise. "Another hall here," Loki said, "Then an elevator ride to the hangar. Simple."

"So you're staying on Sakaar," Thor said.

"I think it's for the best, don't you?"

Thor considered him. Then he nodded. "I was thinking the same thing," he lied.

There was just the briefest hesitation as they reached the next door and Loki went to open it, then he just nodded. "Look at that," he said, "Finally we agree on something." Flippant, but devoid of his usual cheer.

"This place is perfect for you," Thor said. "Savage, chaotic, lawless. You're doing great here — soon enough you'll be Grandmaster yourself. A whole world of puppets to dance on your strings." He gave Loki a smile that was meant to look encouraging.

Loki studied him as they took the hall toward the elevator. There was a rare note of genuine hurt in his voice when he finally said, "Do you truly think so little of me?"

Thor felt little stab of guilt that he thought, for once, Loki hadn't provoked intentionally. "Loki, I thought the world of you," he said, and when his brother didn't respond to the sentiment with his usual dismissal, Thor continued, "I know I didn't always show it. I don't know if I ever said it. I never thought I had to. I'm sorry, for that."

Loki was quiet. They stepped into the elevator and he hit the button for the hangar. The buttons for each floor lit up as they passed them, and it hit Thor that he was watching a countdown until the moment he finally said goodbye to his brother forever.

_I'm not ready,_  he thought.

_You will never be ready,_  he remembered Loki saying. A day, a year, a hundred, a heartbeat — he would never be ready to lose what he loved. Why should he be?

The floors ticked upward.

Thor reached out and hit a button, and the elevator stopped.

Loki made a noise like a scoff. "Thor, what are—"

Thor raised a hand to silence him, to bid him wait. He was only going to get one more chance at this. Somehow, he'd said all the wrong things every other time he'd tried and now, with everything that had happened — Jane and Hela and Odin and the Serpent and — after all of it, they were on more unsteady ground then ever, the tether between them more fragile than it had ever been.

One thing was different now: they were listening to each other.  _Loki_  was listening. Even then, as Thor gathered his thoughts, he was quiet. Not filling the air with words, sharp as razors.

Listening.

Thor looked his brother in the eyes and said, with all the conviction he possessed, "Come home."

Uncertainty flashed through Loki's eyes. Thor saw him waver like a candle flame.

"I know," Thor said, "I know what it means to ask that of you.  _I know_." He took a deep breath.

"You hid things from me," Thor said accusingly. He tried to keep the anger, the hurt that flooded through him out of his voice. He didn't need it now. "What you thought. How you felt. You let me be ignorant. All our lives you stood in my shadow and hid how it hurt you, and then when it became too much you took it out on me, on all of us. You wrapped yourself in secrets and lies and expected the rest of us to see through them and we  _didn't_.

"It was never that we didn't care, brother. It was never that we didn't love you. We didn't see.  _I_  didn't see.

"I see now." As he'd spoken, Loki's gaze had shifted away. Thor could see the thoughts churning in his mind, every little spring and gear of his brain ticking and turning. He put his hand on Loki's shoulder, met his eyes once more. "You were miserable, and I was ignorant. Brother, if you hear nothing else I say, hear this: when I ask you to come home, I am not asking you for a return to that misery, that ignorance.

"Life... life is about growth. Change. I'm not the person I was. I won't ask you to be, either — not ever."

He took Loki's hand and put the obedience disk and its control device into it, and closed Loki's fingers around them. "If you want to stay, you can tell your friend the Grandmaster that you tried to stop me."

Loki swallowed hard and nodded. Thor let go of him and, after a pause, hit the button to restart the elevator. He watched as Loki stared at the objects in his hand.

"Hey," said Thor cheerfully, when the silence began to get oppressive. "Let's do  _Get Help_."

o

"Nice shot!" said Bruce, as the Valkyrie swept low through the city, taking out one of their pursuers with a burst of fire from the Warsong's guns. She grinned.

"Somewhere in the depths of my childhood, Jarvis is explaining that Star Wars is not a documentary, and Tiny Tony is lamenting that  _this exact scenario_  is never going to happen," said Tony, clinging to the passenger seat with one hand and Bruce with the other.

Tiny Tony had not known how anxiety-inducing space, fighting, or hot alien chicks would be, but that was fine. Let him dream.

"Jarvis doesn't know shit!" the Valkyrie howled. She dipped under an overpass, clipping the road below. A ship behind them plowed nose-first into the concrete. They blew out the other side and out of the city, Bruce and Tony screaming in terror and the Valkyrie whooping with fierce, mad joy.

"They're not giving up!" Bruce said, craning his neck to look behind them.

The Valkyrie circled back around the city, Tony had a surreal moment of seeing the Warsong reflected in the windows of one of the skyscrapers before another ship came blasting toward them.

If the Warsong was a souped-up pickup truck, this thing was a high-end sports car with a brand-new paint job.

"The Commodore," said the Valkyrie, unnecessarily. "Tuck and roll, boys."

"What?" said Bruce, as Tony said, "Shit!"

She swung under the Commodore, rolling the whole ship over, and hit a button that ejected them both out of the passenger seat and up into the open cargo doors of the Commodore.

"Kind of you two to drop in," said a voice from the front of the ship, "Hold on to something." And then they were being flung into the wall as the ship pitched sideways out of the way of incoming gunfire from the Grandmaster's minions.

Tony scrambled up to the pilot's seat, where Loki was manning the console.

"Where's Thor?" he asked.

Loki grinned, as if at some private joke. "I haven't the faintest idea," he said. He jerked the controls again.

Tony managed to cling to his chair. He heard a thump and a shout of protest as Bruce lost his footing again.

Loki slipped down beside the Warsong and the Valkyrie gestured at him to go lower. She opened fire on the ships pursuing them, and as the lead one edged toward her, she slowed abruptly, sending the Warsong smashing into the bigger ship in a fiery blast.

Before they could worry, the Valkyrie smacked into the windshield.

"I swear to God," Tony said, "They're like cartoons."

"Having a rest?" Loki shouted at her.

She pushed herself up on her elbows and made a rude gesture at him.

"What are you doing lying there?" he said, "Go punch something!"

"Oh I'll punch something!" she snarled back at him. She heaved herself up and ran up the ship and out of sight. On what seemed to be a rear-view screen, they saw her launch herself off the Commodore and onto the nearest pursuing ship.

Bruce looked at Tony.

"Yeah I should probably help," he said, activating his suit so that it extended over the rest of his body.

Bruce shook his head. "Tony, no. Tony! Don't leave me alone with," he motioned toward Loki.

"Sorry, babe, I can't— what? I can't hear." Tony backed toward the open hatch as his faceplate snapped down.

"Hello again, Doctor Banner," Tony heard Loki say as he dropped out into the fray.

The Valkyrie ripped a gun off the top of one of the ships, used it to blast the wing off, then tossed it aside. Tony just barely dodged as it went careening into the ocean below them.

_"Damn,"_  he said appreciatively. He flipped past her and hit one ship with a repulsor as he fired a wrist rocket at another. Showing off? Well, maybe just a little. So what if she was a beautiful perfect killing machine, Hulk-leaping from spaceship to spaceship and punching them to death with her bare hands?

They made quick work of their enemies, and as they landed on the last ship, Tony said,  _"You're incredible and everyone who meets you falls in love with you a little bit."_

"I know," she said. She ripped the front of the ship off, pulled out the pilot and flung them into the sea, then reached into the controls to pull the ship closer to the Commodore.

They were interrupted by a burst of gunfire as the Grandmaster's riot control ship pulled up behind them.

_"Surrender now and you will not be harmed,"_  the Grandmaster's voice promised them over the ship's speakers.

"Shit," the Valkyrie said.

_"Throw this at him, I'll get you,"_  Tony told her. She pulled the controls up sharply, then jumped off the ship. Tony caught her by the wrist.

The Grandmaster's ship managed to barely avoid the other ship, but as it swung back into place, guns charging, they saw something coming up behind it.

_"What the hell is that?"_  Tony asked. The Valkyrie grinned.

A titanic vessel rose up through the debris toward them, overtaking the Grandmaster's ship with sheer size. The smaller ship had to maneuver around it to avoid being run over. A lone figure stood atop it, a massive gun (Tony's brain supplied the word "bazooka" even though the alien technology wasn't really recognizable as such) on one shoulder and a tattered red cape streaming from the other.

_"Lord of Thunder! Cease and desist immediately or_ _—"_

"It's  _God_  of Thunder!" Thor roared, and shot it. The missile exploded into the side of the riot control ship, which clipped one wing of the big ship as it spun away, but didn't do any damage.

Tony sped up into the Commodore as the Valkyrie cheered. Inside the Commodore, alarms were screeching. Tony recognized the message flashing on the screen as a proximity alert — they were getting close to the Devil's Anus now, and a whirlwind of trash was whipping around them.

The Valkyrie punched Tony in the arm hard enough to dent. "Nice suit!" she said.

"Buckle in," Loki said, "It's going to get rough." He maneuvered back toward the ship coming up behind them. Thor tossed the big gun through the hatch and pulled himself into the ship.

"Dramatic enough?" he asked.

"What the hell is  _that?_ " the Valkyrie asked, gesturing toward the closing hatch doors.

"Well," Thor said, "It just didn't seem fair to leave all those gladiators we freed here on Sakaar while we run off to Asgard, and the Grandmaster had this nice new cruise liner..."

Loki gave a long-suffering sigh, "You're not bringing home more strays, are you?"

"I'm not going to  _keep_  them!"

"Right, just like you weren't going to  _keep_  the goats but there they still are, four hundred years later—"

Thor threw himself into the chair beside the one Tony was buckling himself into and started strapping himself in as Loki docked the Commodore on top of the bigger ship. "Oh really? Really?  _You're_  going to talk to  _me_  about bringing home animals?  _Really?_ "

"I swear on our grandfather's bones, Thor, if you say  _one word_  about the horse you're going to leave this ship in  _pieces_." The ship began to shudder violently as the wormhole overtook them.

"I found drinks!" the Valkyrie yelled over the brothers' bickering. She staggered into the chair next to Bruce, buckled the seatbelt, and took a swig from one of the bottles she was waving around. "Where are my cup holders, Loki?!"

Loki, swearing loudly, fumbled with the controls. A cup holder popped out of the armrest of her chair, but she started laughing too hard to put her bottle in it.

"Happy?!" he shouted at her.

"Ecstatic!" she replied.

Bruce was trying to get her attention. "I feel like I know you!"

"We're all going to die," Tony said, because he felt like someone had to.

And then the wormhole swallowed them, and everything went dark.

o

_Tic tic tic_ — that was the sound that pervaded the little hospital room.  _Tic tic tic_  as Stephen Strange tapped his pen against the arm of his chair while he sat examining the top photo in a small stack. That and the soft snoring of the teenage boy sleeping in the chair next to him, and the muffled buzz of music being played too loudly over a pair of headphones. A cheery bubble of bright yellow mums sat in a little pot on the windowsill.

Strange picked up the photos to look at a book in his lap, then stopped his tapping long enough to copy down something in a notebook, which he then scratched out.

"You've been out for about thirty-six hours," Strange said, without looking up. He was writing something down again. "Induced coma for most of it. Your heart stopped after he brought you in. You were dead for an entire twenty-seven seconds."

"What happened?" Jane asked. Her voice came out as a harsh creak. She felt like someone had taken a scouring pad to her throat. But it could have been worse. It could have been death.

"Jormungand's poison," Strange said. "You inhaled it. And  _then_  you inhaled the East River, which honestly sounds way worse to me, but apparently the water mostly neutralized the effects. I guess it makes sense. As long as that thing's been living in the ocean, if that poison didn't dissipate in water, there'd be no life on the planet anymore."  _Tic tic tic_ , he went back to tapping the pen.

"Have you been here this whole time?" she asked, and coughed.

"I'm here anyway, remember?" he said, pulling at his hospital gown. "Hela stabbed me. Might as well keep your company company. They helped me figure out some of your tech. I'm trying to figure out some of the magic Hela used on it. I don't suppose you know anything about bind runes?"

She shook her head. "Where's Thor?" she asked.

Strange flipped to another photo and examined it for a second. Finally, he stopped his tapping and set everything down and looked up at her.

"We don't know," he said. "We were kind of hoping you could help with that."

"Hey, you're not talking to me, are you?" said a groggy voice from the side of the room Jane couldn't see. She pushed herself up on her elbows as Strange shook his head and pointed at her.

Darcy's shriek of joy as she scrambled out of her chair and threw herself over Jane woke up the kid in the chair next to Strange.

"You're okay, you're okay, you're okay—" Darcy chanted, squeezing her gently.

Jane hugged her back, hard.

o

It took less time than Jane expected to check herself out of the hospital. Darcy had brought her a change of clothes. Her bills had been fully paid, the administrator at the front desk told her. The mums said they were from someone named May Parker, who the teenager said was his aunt.

"Who... are you?" Jane asked him.

"Uh," he said, "I'm Peter. I'm uh. You know—" He looked around, then pulled up the sleeve of his hoodie to reveal a red sleeve crisscrossed with black webs. "You know?" He shook her hand awkwardly and said, "I'm a really big fan of your work." Jane beamed at him.

Stephen took somewhat longer. He was harassed at every step by Christine, who insisted he wasn't ready to leave.

"If you come in here stabbed again, I'm handcuffing you to the bed," she said finally. She gave Jane a hug before they left.

"Where to?" Darcy asked, taking the wheel as they all piled into Jane's van.

"My place first," Jane said. "Then the warehouse."

o

"No, it's cool, I'll get something out," Peter was saying quietly into his cell phone as they drove up to the warehouse with evening falling around them, "Yeah, don't wait up. No, I'm fine, I won't be too late— yeah, I love you too."

It was bizarrely normal, a teenager checking in with his folks. It made Jane feel like she should call her mom and tell her she was okay.

The warehouse was teeming with Stark's security personnel. There was even a guy on the roof, keeping watch. A pair of blond bombshells met them as they parked and got out of the van; the man offered to take the stack of binders out of Jane's hands as she walked up (which she allowed, warily,) while the woman shook her hand.

"You must be Doctor Foster," she said. "I've heard a lot about you but I don't think we ever met."

Beside her, Darcy choked on her coffee.

Peter greeted the man, "Brooklyn."

The man grinned. "Queens." His voice plucked distantly at Jane's memory.

"Are you guys SHIELD?" Jane asked, feeling like she'd missed something.

"Not quite," he said, "It's good to finally meet you, Doctor Foster. I'm Steve Rogers."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was planning on saving that hospital scene for the next chapter but I feel like at this point, you guys have waited long enough.
> 
> Here's hoping to getting back to regular updates!


	24. Lull

Tony waited in the dark for his suit to power back up. It had been a hell of a ride, and he was pretty sure he'd been unconscious at one point. Eventually the screen flickered back on.

It was black for a moment, and then the Commodore's console lights came on, and a purple emergency light. The others were still slumped in their chairs, unmoving. Tony unbuckled himself and leaned in to watch the screen as the ship's computer rebooted.

He heard the Valkyrie swear behind him. "Hell of a ship," she said.

"Yeah, none of the critical systems even went down," Tony observed.

"And my bottle didn't come out of the cup holder," she said with a chuckle. "Dropped the other one, though."

Tony heard it clink somewhere and found it rolling on the floor between the seats, miraculously unbroken. By the time he reached over to hand it to her, she had already opened the second one.

Slowly they all sat up, freed themselves from their seatbelts, and swayed or staggered or fell out of their chairs. In the pilot's seat, Loki stretched his legs, then turned back to bring up a map on the screen.

"Maybe two hours before we hit Asgard," he said, when Thor asked him.

"And-and we can get home from there, right?" Bruce asked.

"If we can't, it's Loki's fault," Thor said, clapping his brother on the shoulder.

"Naturally," said Loki.

"How long do you think we've been gone?" Tony asked.

Bruce gave him a funny look. "What do you mean?"

Thor was nodding. "You were saying something about time flowing differently on Sakaar," he said.

Thor looked at Loki, who looked at Tony, who said, "Narnia time. Have we only been gone like ten minutes?"

Thor gave a half-shrug, "Probably? Not including travel time." He looked over at Loki, who zoomed out the chart on the computer screen. "That's—" he blew out a breath. "What is that, two thousand jump points between here and Sakaar? Given the size of the Devil's Anus and the speed of penetration—"

Tony snickered.

"Can you please  _never, ever_  say those words again?" Bruce interjected.

Thor ignored them, "That's what? Twenty hours or so?" he looked at Loki.

"I'm sorry, my brain had to reboot after 'penetrating the Devil's Anus' —" (Tony stifled a giggle.) "— but yes, that math sounds right."

"You're such a  _child_ ," said the Valkyrie, shaking her head at Loki. She looked at Thor and said, "And  _you're_  a nerd."

"Look, I had a very good education as a prince of Asgard," Thor said. "Not that I'm implying that you didn't have a good education. Asgard has the best schools, even for peasants. Not that I think that you're a peasant. Not that there's anything wrong with being a peasant. I have plenty of friends who are peasants. Like—" he fumbled, "Like — Bruce."

She looked at Bruce, who looked back and forth between the two Asgardians.

"I have seven PhDs," he said, sounding confused and slightly offended.

She took a deep drink from her bottle and walked out of the room.

Loki was staring at Thor like his brother was a train wreck he couldn't look away from. "What is  _wrong_  with y—"

"I  _don't_ _ **know**_ ," Thor howled, before he could even finish the sentence.

" _Wow_ ," Tony said. "Now  _that_  was  _smooth_."

"Shut up," Thor said. Loki patted his shoulder.

"Hey, but," said Bruce, "What does 'Narnia time' mean?"

"You know, like how the kids were in the wardrobe for decades and then they came out and no time had passed," said Tony, "And then they went back like a year later and it had been 200 years."

"So... how long was I in Narnia?"

"And on  _that_  note," said Loki, snagging the bottle and slipping out the door after the Valkyrie.

Thor stood and inched toward the door. "Yeah, I'd better..." he said, gesturing in the direction his brother had headed.

"Aw, come on!" Tony shouted after him as he scurried off.

Bruce gave him a concerned look. "Tony?"

Tony sighed. "Two years."

"Two— two  _years?!_  I was the Hulk for  _two years?!_ " He must've seen something in Tony's face. "What?" he asked, "What is it?"

"It's been two years since Sokovia," Tony said. "I don't know how long you were the Hulk on Sakaar. Just... longer."

"Longer?" Bruce said, "Like... like how much longer? Tony?"

Tony sighed. "Thor and I fell into a wormhole," he said. "Seconds apart. I was on Sakaar almost a week before he showed up."

"Jesus," Bruce breathed. He was quiet for a time.

Tony came over and slumped into the seat next to him. When Bruce still looked like he was trying to wrap his head around it after a minute, Tony reached out and rubbed his shoulder.

"It was different this time," Bruce said, "Normally I feel like me and the other guy — like we've both got a hand on the wheel, you know? But this time it was like he had the keys and I was locked in the trunk. This wasn't... I didn't just get angry, Tony. He  _took over_."

"You're back now," Tony said, "It's okay."

"No, no, no— it's not  _okay_. It's  _the opposite_  of okay. What if this happens again? What if next time it happens, I can't come back?" Bruce sucked in a breath, held it for a moment, then let it out. "What if that's what's coming? What if it just gets harder and harder until I can't get out again?"

"That's not gonna happen," Tony said. "We'll figure it out." He wished he felt as sure as he sounded.

It was cruel, it really was. Still, it wasn't as if it was going to get any easier, was it?

"There's more," Tony admitted.

"More?" Bruce said incredulously.

"Yeah..." Tony said, "Cap and I had a falling out."

o

The Scrapper who could not escape being called a Valkyrie emptied her bottle and perused the selection of drinks stocked behind the generous bar in the Commodore's main room. If there was one thing the boss did well, it was a party.

How good did a party have to be to justify the sort of blood it took to get a place at it? Asgard threw plenty of parties, too, and had just as much blood. It wasn't less guilt, or even better guilt. Just different, older.

She wondered if she'd miss the Grandmaster. Probably not. Odin, at least, had been the sort of deadly that never pretended to be stupid, and anyway, he was gone now.

Loki, as king, stood at a sort of halfway point between them, she thought. He saw further than the Grandmaster, who feared nothing and thus had the luxury of leaving things to chance, but he had the same self-serving disregard for those beneath him. But he loved Asgard, as Odin had — out of spite, perhaps, for those who had (for whatever reason) made him feel as though it didn't belong to him. That felt like Loki; to love something so fiercely out of spite.

Thor was different. She didn't know where he fit yet. She couldn't imagine him as king. She saw in him almost none of the traits she associated with strong rulers — the guile, the cruelty, the ambition.

And maybe that was worse. Because Loki was what he was without pretense or shame, but who could say what Thor would be when the gilding came off? (And yet, some part of her she thought she'd drowned long ago said: solid gold was a real thing, wasn't it?)

She selected a bottle and a glass, pulled the top off, and poured herself a drink.

When the two mortals came out of the cockpit and Bruce walked over, sat at the bar, and put his head down on it with a  _thump_ , she poured him a drink, too.

"What's eatin' you?" she asked him.

All he said was, "Ugh."

"I'll drink to that," she said, clapping him on the shoulder.

"So where'd the Brothers Grimm head off to?" Tony asked. He'd stripped off his armor.

She shrugged. "Probably to check on their new subjects."

"Oh man," said Tony, "I can't believe we stole Korg. Is there space mail? Does space mail go to Sakaar? If I get his autograph, can I mail it to a friend back on Sakaar?"

The Valkyrie grinned. "That's right," she said, "You were with the jotun's crew. Gravda's gonna lose her shit."

"You know her?"

"We dated for like, five minutes. Drink?"

He took the untouched one she'd left for Bruce and toasted her. She clinked his glass with the bottle and took a swig.

"So," Tony said, wandering around the room, "Do high-end starships usually have interiors that look like... I was gonna say 'my old place' but let's go with 'fancy hotel'?" He examined the mirrored ceiling.

"It's a leisure vessel," she said, "Grandmaster uses it for his good times. Parties, orgies, that sort of thing."

Bruce's head snapped up. "What?"

Tony, unfazed, threw himself onto one of the plush couches in the center of the room.  _"Oh, yeah,"_  he groaned, sinking into it. "Is space jetlag a thing?"

"You don't have to add 'space' to everything just because we're in space, Tony," said Bruce. "Sorry, did you say he uses this place for  _orgies?_ "

"Men are such babies," she said. "Relax. He has it cleaned."

"Seriously though, we smushed like twenty hours of travel into one intergalactic roller coaster ride. Is anybody else exhausted?"

Bruce went over and plopped down on the couch. "That's my secret, Tony," he said into a pillow, "I'm always tired."

o

It didn't seem like any time at all before someone shook Tony awake.

"Are we home?" he heard Bruce ask sleepily.

"Almost," said Thor.

"There is no sleep like jetlag sleep," said Tony, stretching. "Where's 132?"

Thor looked confused for a moment.

"In the pilot's seat," Loki said, from somewhere behind them. Thor beckoned. There was something very kid-on-Christmas-morning in his face. Tony dragged himself off the sofa to follow him.

"Why can't I just sleep until 'almost' is 'yes'?" Bruce groaned.

"Because," said Thor, "I want to show you Asgard."

"Why are  _you_  so excited?" Tony asked him, "You see it all the time."

"From the Bifrost," said Thor, "Not from  _space_."

Looking over nearly gave Tony a heart attack. It was a  _screen_ , he had to remind himself. It looked as though the whole wall had come away, and there was nothing between them and the vast emptiness of space except Loki, and a little floating cluster of buttons on the screen that he was manipulating.

_"We're coming up on it now,"_  said the Valkyrie's voice from somewhere in the vicinity of the menu as Loki dismissed it and stood back.

There was a glow in the distance, among the stars. A line of light like a bright horizon coming toward them.

"Bruce," Tony said, groping over at him.

"I'm getting up," Bruce insisted. Tony wasn't listening.

It had rings, he thought at first. Like Saturn.

Huge rings. Massive ones. They stretched in a silvery haze and at the heart of it, Asgard gleamed like a jewel.

But when the Commodore got closer he realized he was seeing not rocks and dust but fluffy white clouds.

It seemed to be very close all at once. Tony had expected it to be bigger. He'd seen pictures of Earth from space — a breathtaking little blue marble. That was what a planet looked like, in his mind. That was not what Asgard looked like.

It was flat. A huge flat circle of ocean, like a dinner plate. Waterfalls spilled from the edge of the sea, gushing down into the void in shining sheets.

Tony knew Bruce was looking, then, because he heard him whisper, "Holy shit."

_"We're gonna have company soon,"_  came the Valkyrie's voice.

Thor and Loki exchanged a look and a couple of shrugs. Thor sighed. "I'll be up there in a second," he said. He punched his brother in the arm before he left.

Tony barely registered any of this.

It was like flying through the Nothing and coming upon the Ivory Tower. Far beyond the beauty of it was the  _unearthliness_  of it, in the most literal sense of the word. Sakaar had been a place, with spaceships and aliens, but this — this was  _another world_.

There was a building on an outcropping of rock on the edge, a golden globe from which ran a road of glowing iridescent crystal. It made its way across the sea and into a city where sleek futuristic accents merged seamlessly with pseudo-medieval stone architecture, dominated by a massive golden structure like the pipes of an organ. Beyond the city were mountains.

It was heaven. A child's-cartoon heaven. A gilded city in the clouds. It was patently absurd. Tony wanted to crack a joke and couldn't find one.

"Welcome," Loki's voice rang in their ears, "To the Realm Eternal."

o

"Look," said Rhodey, "I get it. I do. But I didn't fight him in New York, or before, and three days ago I was stopping him from eating a Tide Pod and arguing with Tony about whether  _Barracuda_  or  _Toxic_  was a better ring tone for him. I have a hard time seeing him as an evil overlord."

"Toxic," said Fury, without looking up from whatever he was doing on his phone.

Natasha made a face, "The lyrics, though."

"It's not  _about_  the  _lyrics_ ," said Rhodey, with the air of someone who had already made this argument.

Steve looked like he wasn't following this at all. Probably because they were getting off-topic. Natasha was about to steer them back on point when he asked, "Sorry, just — he tried to  _eat_  a Tide Pod?"

"Loki did not  _try to eat_  a Tide Pod. He's an alien, not a toddler," said Strange, who was sitting at a table poring over a trio of books. Asgardian runes, apparently, were not  _quite_  the Elder Futhark. "Thor  _tried to feed him_  a Tide Pod," he clarified.

"He seems like he'd be a picky eater," said Rhodey, shaking his head and looking disturbed. "Nope."

"There's a myth where he gets in an eating contest with a wildfire," said Strange.

Everyone turned to stare at him.

He stared back. "What? What idiot makes friends with Norse gods and doesn't pick up a copy of the Eddas?"

Steve looked offended and opened his mouth to object. Natasha silenced him with a raised hand and regarded Strange with a very serious expression.

"Did you find out if he really banged the horse?" she asked.

"Do I  _look_  like someone who wants to get stabbed?" Strange asked her sarcastically.

"Hela thought so," quipped Wong.

"It seemed rude," said Doctor Foster from where she stood delicately dissecting the wires of the portal machine's control panel.

"Hela stabbing Doctor Strange?" asked Peter, who was helping her.

She rolled her eyes. "No, tracking down Norse mythology. How would you like it if you met somebody new and they went and dug up a ton of gossip on you from years before you met?"

She might like Jane Foster, Natasha though.

"I totally looked up Norse mythology," said Darcy, who was not helping at all. "Thor's myths are mostly, 'and then he showed up and hit somebody and they died.' All the fun stuff is Loki."

"Fun," said Steve.

"He's called the 'mother of monsters.'"

"Weird," said Jane. "Why?"

Darcy looked at her like she was stupid. "Because he gave birth to a bunch of monsters, why else?"

"I'm sure that's made up," said Jane. "I didn't see anything  _that_  weird in Asgard."

"I mean," said Rhodey, "We saw him turn into a  _bird_..."

"Well, I meant monsters but turning into a bird isn't the same as turning into a woman. Is it?"

"Birds don't even technically have human sexes, it's a completely different set of chromosomes," said Strange. They all stared at him again. "I considered veterinary school," he admitted.

"Before... Hogwarts?" Peter asked.

"Before  _medical school_."

Peter's confused reply was interrupted by the door to the warehouse coming open.

"Finally," said Steve.

Wanda slid in the door, flanked by Sam and a pair of ex-SHIELD security who were clearly making her uncomfortable. She leaned into the Vision, who had an arm around her, and relaxed visibly when she saw Steve. She scurried over to him, but was distracted at once by the portal machine.

She reached out one delicate, ring-bedecked hand toward it, power bleeding off the tips of her fingers like red smoke. Almost everyone in the room took a step back. The Vision put a hand on her shoulder to stop her short of actually touching it.

"What is this?" she asked, momentary trance broken.

"It's an Einstein-Rosen Bridge generator," Jane chirped, as though none of this were out of the ordinary. "I'm Jane Foster, by the way." She held out her hand and Wanda shook it as she introduced herself. Yes, Natasha decided. She liked Jane Foster.

"Gang's all here," Steve said. All who were coming, anyway.

"Good," said Maria Hill, who was sitting at a computer across the room, "Because it looks like we've got a lead on our girl."

She tapped the screen and moved out of the way so that they could see a news headline that read, "nine dead at shipyard." Below it was a blurry security-camera image of the side of a container ship studded with twisted black swords.


End file.
